FLOPPIE – TOMATO'S PAST

Breaking beats! Break beats! Bbeats! It's a lovely spot of this sort of breakcore-y thing from an Aichi-based musicmaker and purveyor of soul-lifting break beats floppie. Recently well I say recently but this is like four months ago back in August, back when the days are long and the nights are short and intrepid and wrapped in insomniac warmth, floppie released an EP on lolicore-affiliated label The Worst Label. The title? A Tomato Supreme. I found this a couple of months ago and I was hooked by the name of the EP and the nature of the songs - it all seemed to be about tomatoes. I have or had or harbour the ghost of an obsession with tomatoes. I like them in ketchup. I like them in pasta. I like them in curry. I like them in many forms except raw. I cannot begin to describe my aversion to raw tomatoes. My skype name even features the word "tomato" so that just about seals it - this is an EP for me. But what was it all about?

"whats with tomato?" somebody asked in the comments. floppie answered: "I was inspired by the word tomato. There is no deep meaning ^u^)/"

"I do not like Tomatoes :P" said one commenter; floppie replied "Me too... >_<"

Me too, I typed just now, glancing quickly at the cat curled cutely under the table. So without further ado let's just listen to probably the most heavenly cut from this tasty lil EP, 'Tomato's Past'.

Somewhere along the line, it seems that "Tomato" is the name of every whimsical love or crush you've ever and never had, embodied in the various SoundCloud track artwork for the EP in the form of a red-haired girl, effusing lolicore aesthetics.

But but but, where were we? 'Tomato's Past' – a whooshing leftover from previous more futuristic track 'おやすみTomato-Chan' leads us into delicate droplets of piano like lingering on sweet memories, glistening key touches that morph and merge into warmer more urgent piano chords forming the emotive backdrop on which floppie spins hyperactive undeniably virtuosic clusters of breakbeats at breakneck speed, the percussive drillings accompanied by an occasional yammering vocal sample just about audible and a dynamic whoosh of noise that separates the song's parts.

Things become more intense in its second half, split from the first with a cute glockenspiel melody and then jumping into the impressive cavalcade of percussion in the next section, strings subtly rising up, sumptuous cymbals crashing into the empty space behind the piano-and-beats combination. How sweet is this song, how jittery and excited like the thumping heart and gentle nausea of love and first romances and even the urgency to live and experience life in light of painful nostalgia telling you that the distance between the more idealised portions of your past and your present day ever-hurtling-to-tomorrow is slowly becoming more and more sizeable. It's that winsome love of life and gentle kindness and excited passion that floppie celebrates with this addictive track and it's totally believable.

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• Definitely check out floppie's A Tomato Supreme EP on The Worst Label's Bandcamp.

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☟ floppie Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Bandcamp • Twitter

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MINOGAME – FORGET ME NOT

Any style of music suffixed by -core generally isn't widely held to be inherently "beautiful". Leave that to Edvard Grieg and ambient music and toytronic etc. But there are people out there making music that is both xxxxx-core and beautiful. Stunning, actually, if we want to all out on this one.

Specifically I'm talking about lolicore and this track, although not tagged as such, by Minogame called 'forget me not'. I've sort of self-diagnosed it as lolicore because it's arrived to our ears courtesy of lolicore-aligned label The Worst Label. We arrive now at the crucial moment where you open up the the keep gate of your mind and let in the broken frantic beats and vital charm of this piece of music.

It begins with delicate harp prostrating itself sadly amidst the finely textured rain sounds, the fluid plunks of the harp are joined by emotive strings as crunchy bitcrushed beats begin to clack into view, marching across the sky with all the crazed static of an approaching storm. Here is pathetic fallacy in music itself: a sad song mirrored by the eruption of heavy rain and thunderclaps.

Which may or may not appear in reality: amidst the chaos of rapid-fire, stretched and pitch-shifted, tormented snares there need be no extra sound effects. The breaks themselves are stormy enough, punctuated with offcuts of unknown high-register vocals, ripped apart and scattered for melodic effect as the aching virtuosity of these drum edits continue on their way. All the while, a new element in the touching backdrop of sound, a soft, resounding set of occasional chords, laps at the jagged corners here with puppy-dog eyes.

WHOOOSH~~ and we're back in the melting, heart-wrenching emotion from the beginning of the song. A subtle ringing bleep signals every now and again, then cuts into a continuous tone just like the beep of an ECG machine that tells you when someone's heart has stopped. Through this song, after breakneck calamity, a heart breaks somewhere.

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• Fun fact: the moniker Minogame is analogous to the Japanese word minogame, a kind of turtle that grows algae on its back, and plays a part with the tale of Urashima Tarō from Japanese myth; minogame (蓑亀) literally means 'straw raincoat turtle'.
• 'forget me not' is taken from Minogame's recent album home is where the worst are for The Worst Label, where you can download it for any price you like. (Also available as physical CD from Minogame's Bandcamp).

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☟ Minogame Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Twitter • Bandcamp

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YEONGRAK – POPPUNK

Continuing the YES/NO love affair with lolicore/noise/and-other-things label Mecha Yuri, I'd like to introduce another proponent of the label, yeongrak. A musicmaker from New Zealand (I think), they've just recently released an album, little submucosal via the netlabel, a collection of mesmerising noise-infused morsels of music that vary from explosively overdriven to delicate and brain-cleansing, bristling with punchy experimentalism.

Because we love knowing shit, I googled "submucosal" – a biological term, turns out it refers to being situated in between the "mucosa" (a lining of the throat and intestines, to do with facilitating the production of mucus) and the tissue that connects the mucosa. Interesting. Gross. How can just reading about the body feel like a horror film? But in this lies the key element of rebellion-through-shock that is a widely held, stylistic and ideological tenet of the lolicore genre and all associated its associated offshoots.

Anyway, we've chosen the album's opener, 'poppunk', to showcase.

In its glistening digitalism, its chimes and soothing ambient electronic croons, is the fleeting beauty of life; our fragile nature at heart played out on childlike glockenspiel, a living-dream feel resounding in the soft tangle of synth at work in the ether throughout the track. A beat heralds reality: an almost confusing medley of stuttering hi-hats, heart-bursting kicks and abrasive velcro handclaps. It becomes noisier, more damaged, with the added distorted husk of a bass kick crunching its way onward, and razor sharp open hats adding their lethal metallic touch to the track; all in all, there is in 'poppunk' all the unexpected, offbeat fun of grime, but with a combined and equal penchant for delicacy and noise at the same time.

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• You can obtain the album little submucosal from Mecha Yuri's Bandcamp.
• yeongrak recently did a split album with goreshit, one of the originators of lolicore as a genre of a music, called safety cuts. Check it out.

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☟ Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Bandcamp • Twitter • Tumblr

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GOMIGOMI – TRUE LOVE

What do we have here? It is a song by a producer called gomigomi and it's called 'True Love'. I was checking out a compilation by lolicore/breakcore affiliated label called The Worst Label; if you don't know it and you happen to enjoy glitchy heart-attack breaks distorted noise-verging sounds mixed with occasional swathes of beautiful melody and topped with anime/manga (to be very broad) aesthetics – including a fair few samples thereof – then you should check it out. Clicking some sort of link or googling it will get you there but why am I saying this.

The compilation, called #N0T TRU3 LUV, was curated by gomigomi and features other artists in the same sort of vein of music (Riajuu, Rotten Blood, Napkin Terrorizer, p.stmdrn, Vixenvy). Why gomigomi, though? Why not any of the other artists on the compilation?

Basically, this track 'True Love' stuck with me. Sure, it's like a minute (01:16) long, but within this modest unit of time there's a galaxy of sound. It's like a masterpiece in miniature, and perhaps the great thing about making tracks with such breakneck BPMs is, in theory, you can fit more in, but that's a very basic way of looking at things.

The rolling drums in the beginning section of the track arrive with a kind of triumphal march feel after a spot of Japanese language lesson in the sample – "hajimemashite, nice to meet you"; delicate music filled with flutes and harps gets chopped and sandwiched between the beats, or "breaks" if you're feeling specific, laden with glitch sensibilities, as they become more raucous and FX-beset, the beats are crushed, sped-up, slowed-down, brought back to the more organic feel of the initial drums, all in all juddering like a mad machine but with a sense of breezy cuteness, broken pastorality.

Speaking of which, a later track on the compilation seems to be the spiritual sequel to this particular track. That's in terms of the broken-pastoral quality, anyway. It's called 'Hitbox Samurai' (a "hitbox" is the area that's assigned to an object in a videogame, the boundaries of which define when that object is "hit" or struck in-game) and it's served up with similar slices of diced-up incidental music, giving it a breezy atmosphere whilst the beat here is even more glitched-out than before, with stuttering vocal samples peppering their truncated cuteness throughout.

An interesting note: These tracks and the others on the compilation are all tagged "shoujocore" – shoujo, if you don't know, is a Japanese word that basically refers to any underage girl (i.e. younger than 20). This could be taken a few ways: an attempt to dissociate from the lolicore label for whatever reason; or it could be a conscious attempt to mature the lolicore scene by gently nudging it to the next natural age level; I think gomigomi used to go under the moniker matoakai, so it might reference this progression; or lastly, and quite probably, the label of shoujocore is a preferential whim. I've not seen it before, but it could already be a thing, in which case I'm guessing it just refers to a different type of (less loli-oriented) aesthetic.

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• So, yes, you can grab these two tracks and more from the #N0T TRU3 LUV compilation courtesy of The Worst Label's bandcamp page. Pay anything you like~
• The art is really nice I think. It's by Yunjung. You should go have a scroll through her art.

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☟ gomigomi Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter • Tumblr

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MATOAKAI – BASS STAR PILOT

Here is probably I think the second ever post I've written about lolicore. The first time around was about a super-catchy track called '4U' by maedasalt. This time the high-octane madness crash lands on your screens courtesy of Atlanta, Georgia-based musicmaker Matoakai with a track called 'Bass Star Pilot'.

Fraught with diced-up samples frenetically staccato throughout, the track firstly booms with lightly distorted kicks with abrasive snares resembling a super-decayed kinda breakbeats. After a snippet of somebody talking in Japanese, the beat gets some supreme edits, rattling with super-speed hi-hats and minigun snares, distant cosmic sounds like the rims of wine glasses being played in space providing an otherworldly, atmospheric backdrop to the micro-fractured beats.

A couple of times there's this wild flute sound, a kind of dead-of-night wolf-like sound (I think it's some kind of flute, maybe a Native American one I don't know), which should be out of place – a 'natural' sound in amidst the mad mechanical chops and cuts – but works perfectly; a song of instinct as a star pilot navigates their way through perilous multitudes of asteroids, warning lights flashing urgently inside the tiny starship as it zips past obstacles like a crazy insect.

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• Check out the album this is taken from, Yuri Forver, released on lolicore-friendly netlabel, Mecha Yuri.
• It seems Matoakai has decided to call it a day under that moniker; I can't find them anywhere. However, someone called gomigomi says that they are "Post Matoakai" on their SoundCloud, which I reckon is probably the right person.

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☟ Matoakai / gomigomi Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter • Tumblr

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MAEDASALT – 4U

It's always interesting to discover something new. And not that I never heard of this type of music before but rather that I've actually bothered to listen to it. Thanks to Twitter I thought I'd go check out an album by a Seattle-based musicmaker named maedasalt called (named called, stupid) you are special & that is exactly why i love you so much. Literally as soon as it started playing I was like wtf is this — however, I listened to it all. I couldn't stop myself. It is totally addictive. And really good if you have to do things at a computer, helps time whizz by.

x What is this strange genre? It's lolicore. What? Yes lolicore is like speedcore (super fast dance music, like rarely below 300bpm) except with less of the aggression. Rather in its aesthetics it follows in the same vein as loli-based stuff (a truncation of 'lolita' – yes the same as "Lolita" in Nabokov's creepy book), which is basically a hyperextension of what might be called kawaii or cute with regards to young girls. Kinda weird but that's that. Much like trap music seems to have paired with anime for otaku trap, if that it can be called, lolita sensibilities ooze into these extreme stretches of bpm for lolicore. Nuff said.

Anyway one song stood out: '4u'. Featuring rapid chipmunk vocals – so deformed that you cannot tell what they're from (unless you knew the original already) – over a sped-up drum-and-bass pattern, the track is filled with ascending melodies and toybox twinklings that effuse the impression of living Einstein's dream of riding on a beam of light with the redshift more like pastel pink and the blueshift more like pale teal. Yee-fuckin-haw. Then you realise its not space you're flying through; you're just zipping around and around and around attached to a mobile at the ceiling of a colourful plushie-filled distorted and giant playroom.

It's a ball of energy, not just through the sounds but through the dynamics, how and when the rhythm of the drums changes, when to change the tack of the vocal sample, all to keep it wildly interesting and me jiggling my foot like a paranoid maniac. So it came as a surprise to learn that the album this track comes from was maedasalt's "swan song", the final album made under his current moniker. The reasons?

because i’m also over feeling the way i did back when maedasalt started, which was over heartbreak. the dream ends and real life begins. from 2011 to this year i’ve changed as a person and it’s only fitting. i’m no longer feeling restricted to feeling bad for myself endlessly.

Fair enough (more from his tumblr post about it here). He also adds: "at the end of the day its all just lolicore which is inherently a silly genre, but i always made it with my own personal touch." Inherently it is a silly genre – breakneck bpms? Funny voices? That's silly alright. But silly doesn't necessarily mean lacking in emotion, lacking in depth, lacking in talent and vision. And with '4u' I was and am aware of something catching my attention, an inexplicable love, which usually happens when everything in a song is just right, and that takes some doing.

• If you have an open, curious mind, why not check out the beautifully titled album you are special & that is exactly why i love you so much courtesy of netlabel Mecha Yuri. At least you will experience something new. You can even purchase it on a pay-what-ya-like basis.
• The album artwork depicts Aiko, a character from the manga Oyasumi Punpun.

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☟ maedasalt Social Media Presence ☟
Facebook • SoundCloud • Bandcamp • official site

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