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And Budokan would finally be used for its original purpose xD I always imagine bands literally battling each other whenever I see "vs" in a tour title . I hope DIR EN GREY vs PIERROT's photoshoot will look like this:

Ruiza was already a Johnny's when this kid was still in diapers.

lol according to japanese wikipedia, he used to be a johnny's kid and "retired" from the entertainment industry in 2010. Now a little community knows he got himself pierced and tattooed and ran off to follow his dreams of playing in a vk session band

I regret google image search... no one said anything about Setsuna in fact being a child star called Shota Yoshino wtf

Who is Setsuna and why is he so famous?

vkdb has a calendar for news (new bands, disbandments, new members, departures, revivals etc), birthdays, and releases, but the release list rarely includes live dists. puresound lists most live-limited releases and it's one of the most conclusive sources to find a band's entire discography

La Venus eligible for Oscar Nomination: http://loudwire.com/x-japan-la-venus-contention-best-original-song-oscar/

@Disposable, all my hats off to you @Pho, i love your take and totally agree with what you're saying - I wasn't trying to provide an argument about traditional instruments vs electronic instruments. That was never my intention. I also don't think that electronic music is killing vk, rather, I was trying to explain [poorly] what makes music popular. But having said that, the fact that music software is now so diverse in the way you can use sound/rhythm packs and other autopilot options, theoretically it can require minimal talent to make a decent sounding song. After all, the main focus of developing technology as such is to open up the option of music creation to a larger audience and not just to a select few. I think that it's easier to excel at hip hop/rnb/electronic music because of the no-frills-attached nature to these genres. Convenient to practice, no burdensome "traditional" instrument to carry around and take care of. It is also a sign of the times why music manufacturers are dying as well; people can seldom afford the time, cost and discipline it takes to learn a traditional instrument. This is probably the reason so many young rock musicians noticeably lack the talent to play their own instruments and they either squander at the bottom rungs of the scene while very few actually improve enough to be acknowledged. I think in these cases it's the rockstar lifestyle that attracts them. It perhaps aids electronic music's short history that you don't need to pass 8 grades of musicianship to become competent, but this could either be beneficial or detrimental to music as an art form. We don't know for sure how music is going to evolve - the curriculums at music schools have yet to take a few years to catch up to and acknowledge a lot of the current trends in music. But at the same time, I don't think any musician pursuing any genre should ditch music theory - it's such an important skill to have even if it's not required in the type of music that you're making. How many times have you encountered a kid who plays guitar that can't read sheet music? Yet sadly, more often than not, it isn't the music that sells - musical excellence is constantly overlooked in favour of appearance and charisma by many music consumers, no matter what genre and that is the unfortunate truth.

I think due to the changing times, what it means to be a musician has shifted significantly. Instruments are often considered to be reserved for elites and/or archaic while turntables and music software can be easily attainable to anyone. Now that technology has become more advanced, anyone is able to create music on the cheap, with a faster turnaround, and without having the knowledge of how to play an instrument. By completely abandoning musical notation and focusing less on complexity and more on catchiness, I think this is what most people will relate to the most. It's what makes mainstream mainstream and it's also what makes pop music so prevalent. Instruments and musical gear are hella expensive and often require a lifetime of practice and care - a skill and dedication that is seen as unattainable to most people and therefore cannot aspire to be. "Why spend my life savings on band gear and learning how to play an instrument when I can replicate the sound on my computer easily?" kind of deal.

This might not be something to go off by as it might be a common thing, but ains-a.com, mediena-official.com and kuroyuritokage.com are all hosted by the same provider, have the same IP, and use the same name servers: Hosting provider: GMO Internet IP Address: 157.7.144.5 Name Servers: dns02.gmoserver.jp dns01.gmoserver.jp I tried to compare this to some unrelated bands and so far it's only ains-related. Interestingly, malisend.com have a different IP and name servers

It's taken them this long, apparently they dropped the new single "Gareki No Uta" today, available on itunes. Guest player: Tomo (DADAROMA) Jacket design: hiLo（ex.NAINE, KAVANE clothing）

lol, by that logic, no band will ever meet the criteria to play at O-East again. So this is just data from google. I admit it's by no means conclusive and am interested in what results Yahoo will show...it might bump that red line up a bit. I think that if the average capacity for a one-man show is akin to Takadanobaba Area's, then that's a healthy number. If you look at the popularity of some of the vk artists on Line, Niconico or Ameba, the numbers speak for themselves. VK peaked in Japan in the 90s. The west caught on the vk at a time when it was already pretty dead in Japan. The data on google trends only goes back to 2004, but you can still see that it was higher than it is now. I did touch upon piracy laws and X Japan/Luna Sea holding the fort, which I might elaborate later. Yohio may be the arbitrary face of vk now, but in the broader sense, yoshiki and his vice grip on the entire vk brand wants you to believe that he is. MegaUpload didn't shutdown until 2012, but still a huge blow nonetheless.

Most people in japan use Yahoo, but I don't think Yahoo has a similar trends analysis tool to google. Hence I searched in Japanese, and Japan was the only region available so I didn't have to narrow it down further: Blue: "visual kei" / Region: global Red: "ヴィジュアル系" / Region: Japan Also communities and individuals migrating from livejournal to tumblr might've been a factor as well. It created a mess at the time and information sources became convoluted.

hahaha Sorry, I should’ve put a disclaimer. VK peaked as fast as it declined in 2009, but in the years leading to 09, it was on the rapid rise. So you’re right, it’s better to associate the boom period as ending around 09. Also, I’m a bit scared to pull up the vk obituaries, but if I remember correctly, 2010 had the highest amount of deaths of any year, and that was one of the “misfortunes” I mentioned about 2010. Poor organising seems to be endemic to alternative music - here in Australia, our biggest rock festival Soundwave was axed because the promoter fell in debt due to poor ticket sales and wasn’t able to refund all the tickets. It seems like anyone who’s business-educated knows that pop would be a more lucrative venture and anyone who’s adamant about promoting anything otherwise is 1. most likely just passionate about it and haven’t necessarily attained any formal qualifications to do so and 2. only popular enough in their own circles. Maybe there’s some kind of Sana cult in eastern Europe that we’re not told about, because otherwise wouldn’t every vk band and their grandmothers be flooding Russia right now…

Noticed something interesting when I was exploring worldwide trends for the search term "visual kei" on google - that tiny spike earlier this year just happened to be when youtubers react to visual kei came out: So visual kei is dead. And at the rate it is going now, will be even dead-er; A scene stagnating on the same looks and sounds, rarely venturing out musically if at all. But it wasn't always that way. Although it would be appropriate to refer to the 90s golden era of vk to remind us of how opulent the scene once was, I want to bring back memories of 2009. In October 2008, Kerrang ran a feature on jrock, publishing an article predicting jrock to go big in Europe in 2009. And sure enough, google trends highlighted the correlation clearly, confirming that the search terms "j-rock" and "visual kei" did indeed peak between January and March 2009. However, following vk's brief global success was a period of near-exponential decline - to what we see now as the lowest point of popularity vk has ever experienced in a 12 year time-span. Even that spike in August wasn't enough to break above 2004's lowest point. Personally, I'd been a passive fan of visual kei for many years prior to 2009, but it wasn't until 2009 that I became fully engaged. One prominent catalyst was Japanese blogging platform Ameba launching its virtual community ‘Pigg’ that year, becoming a game changer in the way fans and bands could interact. Popular musicians were also given accounts powered by ameba, a la twitter's verified personalities. I remember 2009 as a year that several vk bands were going major and gaining international recognition. It was no surprise that vk reached its global height by being much more accessible through social media and other digital channels. This momentum seemed to be gaining quickly until 2010 brought a sharp turn of unfortunate events within the scene and the emergence of kpop poached a large part of the international vk audience. However, the situation in Japan is a bit different, as vk has been pretty steady since it had already declined by the turn of the century. The search term "ヴィジュアル系" on google trends says as much. A few years ago, major labels published all those visual kei cover albums probably in an attempt to raise the relevance of visual kei, but the hype had pretty much died by then. The drought of talent and variety meant that each band was no better than the other, and was enough for many people to lose interest. Stricter piracy laws also meant that music had become less accessible, with people being reluctant to pay the exorbitant prices of some CDs. Not to mention the discontinuation of many vk magazines as an indication of the scene's current degradation. Marketing and business models that worked in the 90s and early 00s struggle to find significance in the present day, yet management has not evolved to adapt to current trends (or have done so poorly). Now that the last of the influential underground vk labels is defunct, vk doesn't have the backing and budget as it once did. X Japan and Luna Sea are like the only lifeline left for vk - there can't even be a vk festival without either X Japan or Luna Sea in the lineup. I remember reading an interview where Yohio mentioned that he kinda killed western interest in vk, but I don't particularly attribute that to those western vk acts damaging the reputation of this uniquely japanese scene. Bands such as D'espairsRay, girugamesh, the Underneath, Rentrer en Soi, Dio, UnsraW and Black:List etc who laid the groundwork for vk to make its mark in the west are no longer around. I'm surprised lynch. didn't carry the torch. I don't want this thread to sound too much like #resurrectvk, but instead I want ignite a discussion (and maybe create a dialog) - how did the vk boom of '09 affect you in your country, what could've been done differently, or the best things to come out of that little modern renaissance of vk history.

@TakadanobabaalienI don’t disagree, I hate pigeon-holing genres. And what once distinguished Nagoya Kei isn’t isolated to that scene anymore, as the looks and sounds have assimilated into the wider visual kei spectrum. It’s pretty obsolete now. I don’t think any source is definitive of the subgenre - even english wikipedia cited Asahi Shinbun’s article on Nagoya Kei, but that doesn’t make it closed to interpretation. Side note: Apparently the term Nagoya Kei predates Visual Kei, so @haiironoanemoneyou might consider this if you’re excluding kotekote Having said that, what about... art-kei - moran, amber gris, more, sioux zetsubou-kei - avelcain food-kei - dezert homage-kei - grieva, gossip vk-djentcore - jiluka grandpa-kei - chaos system, number mouse, the piass chikasen-kei - every under code band ever

A few years ago, Megan Pfeifle from JaME conducted a case study on visual kei that was published in the George Mason University's peer reviewed journal: https://issuu.com/gmreview/docs/gmr_vol21_full/76?ff=true&e=3279065/1255060 At the same time, she adapted her case study into a 13 week webseries called "Globalizing Visual Kei" for JaME. You might find some useful content there. You might also like to check out her dissection of Nagoya Kei. True for avelcain. Early deathgaze embodied the nagoya kei music and style. To some, they might still be considered one of the last nagoya kei bands but the lineage sort of ends with them.

for those interested, Leda played guitar on the title track.

@IGM_Oficial Thanks! The amount of set un-originality these days is kinda overwhelming lol. One day I might start a thread

(Before that, I’m so sorry the length of this introduction reads like an essay but please bear with me ><) I have many interests, but let’s talk about visual kei as this is the one constant that has taken up most of my life. 2009 was a time of change for me and visual kei. Ameba launched its virtual community Pigg, which instantly sucked the life out of me and as it turned out, so many vk bandmen had no life as well. t's embarassing to talk about it now, but as teenagers with nothing better to do with our time, my friends and I would send as many friend requests as we could to band members and ‘stalk’ them whenever they logged online. Suddenly vk had become so much more intimate as we could interact with vk bandmen in real-time like never before. But pigg was more than that. Some of my fondest memories have been the designated VK showroom where you could stream youtube videos to a crowd, meeting new people in the club rooms who share a common interest and of course having to witness the silly antics of some of those bandmen. I got to know a lot of bands that I would otherwise never had found out about, had conversations, learning about their personalities and interests. I also got to learn that some of the musicians in the darkest and heaviest bands have the cutest personalities behind the keyboard, fawning over the colourful array of virtual fashion items pigg had to offer. (Asanao from lynch. case in point) It was a fun and unique experience. And at the same time, information was not only more accessible than ever before, but more abundant as well, and keeping up with blogs, news, forums, and playing pigg consumed every moment of my every day which back then, I had the time and youth to do so. But eventually, I burnt out. I attributed my losing touch with vk to information overload. It’s been more than 4 years since I stopped going on pigg and ameblo for good, but those few years of intense dedication, even today, felt like an aeon. I used to make a lot of parodies of bandmen, and loved deduction and connecting the dots - which bands had photoshoots at which set and making 6-degrees of separation connections between members of different bands and loved hearing stories from the past. I also had a enthusiasm for drawing, having drawn over a ton bands over the course of 2 years between 2011 and 2012, but suddenly it’s 2016 and all I have are 3-year-old drafts and unfinished sketches. Everything had been halted because life kinda got in the way… shattered-tranquility had long stopped being my home page and my internet’s search history doesn’t remember vkdb.jp anymore. Hmm. So in that gap between about 2012 and now, I had the mother of existential crises, questioning whether I was really going to follow vk for life. But my passion in the music is genuine and still alive. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been disconnected from the community that I love for far too long, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to forget the memories I’ve made, the bands that I’ve followed, the stories I’ve heard and the things I’ve learned along the way - be they good or bad. I don’t want my interest of VK to die, and I don’t want to stop making funny content about VK forever. (And most importantly, I don’t want to be the only VK fan in Australia that I know. So if you’re from Sydney, please hit me up so I don’t feel lonely :3) I want this to be the place where I can share my knowledge about vk so ask me anything and I hope to relearn what I’ve lost these past few years. And once again, I’m astronomically sorry about the length of this introduction (I hope it was bearable). Merry Xmas btw

what if ryo joins them? At least he knows how to play violin significantly better than hazuki... he should be able to play 5-string bass, right?

He's grown up now, but Kyoji Yamamoto's son Maoki is also a musician and supported Kamijo on tour a while ago