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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DAEMON – HOW TO FIND SATISFACTION IN DAILY LIFE

Mmmmm it's a question that a lot of people ponder. How do you find satisfaction in daily life? Where does satisfaction come from? Really we should be satisfied by the mere fact we are alive and experiencing some semblance of daily life. In reality, that's different. We're not all happy. Often it is the very fact of daily life and its mundane repetitions, its monochrome routine, it's this that is the source of trouble for many. To live is to struggle. How much you struggle depends on how strong your mind is.

This question was raised by the title of this particular track right here. It is called 'how to find satisfaction in daily life' and it's by a musicmaker called Jaci Rodriguez or probably more easily identifiable as Daemon. I was originally attracted to this slice of sound owing to the tone of its lightly echoing glassy chords, which give this track its foundation of melancholy, but there's more to it – think of the dynamically chopped up breakbeats-style drums, the plonking synth signifying the despairing exhausted parts of your mind, the zapping high-register synth melody repeating throughout like a floating feather of hope.

It resounds with a thousand repetitions of a thousand days, the same alarm clock sound every morning, snippets of suicidal early mornings, of fatigue-worn evenings, days marking the space between the upper reaches of a slowly swinging pendulum, life and all its energies and ambitions flashing in your brain as everyday reality smothers you. I imagine these endless immutable awakenings as the beat gallops ahead, leaving melodies hanging in the air, the drifting sadness of those chords lingering, thickening with each passing day. But there is hope, in a kind of insane way, a wild hope that things will change even though you are doing the same thing every day…

Wow way to get negative, sorry about that. In conclusion: How to find satisfaction in daily life? Weed and lots of it. No, not really, it's whatever works for you.

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• This comes from the aptly titled sad day loops an album released by Daemon on freewheeling, otaku-flavoured netlabel Mecha Yuri. It's good, and self-descrbied as "songs about money and weed." You can get it on a name-your-price basis from Bandcamp.

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☟ Daemon Social Media Presence ☟
SoundCloud • Twitter

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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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