reminiscing2004

Please Aikaryu come back to us, the VK scene needs its saviors once more.

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

It's been a long time since I've done this, but when I was in Japan I'd use a Zoom H2n to record. The audio quality on that is pretty great, while not being too big to get in the way. Pair that up with some high capacity rechargeable batteries and you're good to go. I was able to record an entire 18 hour New Year's event on a single pair of batteries.

@Lestat, you are absolutely right. New bands you like won't have the same impact or mean as much to you. That's an undeniable fact.
 
I should have been more specific. I keep encountering people who refuse to TRY OUT anything post 2005. Not even a "I heard it, didn't dig it. I like the 90's sound" but a "they don't look like a 90's band so they probably suck". Those are those I complain about. Those who talk ill of bands they haven't even bothered listening, and the reasons for not listening to them are "I don't like how they look", "new GazettE sucks, so all bands now probably suck", "their fans are teenagers so they can't be good", "they all look the same so they have to sound the same". 
 
The pessimistic attitude of people who refuse to even try the new scene and their shitthrowing at newer bands they haven't even heard is exhausting. I've gone to parties where they ONLY play indies music from Matina bands and such because if you dare play something post 2006 or something major the majority of the "old farts" (27 +years old) will literally leave the dance floor and start complaining. They don't even stay and listen to something they might dig and it's like they are afraid of liking something new and have their precious reputation of "true VK fan" ruined. And I say true VK in quotation marks because I have LITERALLY heard them talk about what VK is supposed to look like and sound like and cross out VK bands as non VK because they don't look like Kuroyume in 1997.

No one says you can't enjoy old stuff, but this country has the ENORMEOUS luck of having a thriving scene. The incredible luck of having a meet up for the Deathgaze ST and have 70, yes, seventy, people show up in the same town. There's at least 4 or 5 event producers who try to include VK in their cons and events, throw parties and even bring artists, but this can't go anywhere if half of VK fans are trying real hard to keep the scene in the 90's and early 2000's and I swear I cannot understand why they are so obsessed with that.
 
I hope my little rant made some sense and didn't feel too biased.

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

I fell out of the Visual Kei scene in 2010 because all of my favorite present bands were disbanding or going to shit. I fell back into Visual Kei in the last two years because of a discovery/re-appreciation for all of the gold in the late 90s and early 2000s.
 
While I don't have anything present or new to look forward to, I keep finding new things I love from the past. All of my favorite bands I discovered in 2016 were ones that disbanded 15 years ago! And despite that, they make me feel like I've really gotten into VK again.

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

If I don't have control over it, it's not mine. that's been the philosophy I've carried for the better part of ten years, and it's one that hasn't failed me yet. The only time it comes to bite me in the ass is when I don't heed it. I learned my painful, personal lesson not with the loss of my music library, but with the loss of my cyber locker. The death of MegaUpload meant that things I had backed up on that site are lost for good and I'm not getting them back. @fitear1590's example of the movie is another aspect to this conversation.

Industry support of streaming standards stems from a place of profit; with any technological revolution there are bound to be inventions which do one simple thing that upsets the natural order of the ecosystem. One early example is how casettes could record the radio and the head of the MPAA (at that time) complained that the invention was going to kill the radio and introduce rampant piracy. There are plenty more, but the general point I want to get at is that these technologies allow the individual consumer to exert some level of control over our products that was thought infeasible at the time of its creation. This is the first result of a technological revolution where control shifts back to the company owners and away from individual consumers. Companies can determine when something is available, where it's available, and for how long it remains available. I can rip a CD as many times as I want as long as I own it and the tools to do so, but when Netflix or Spotify or some other company can just decide it's no longer profitable to market and remove my access to it, that's it. If I don't have control over it, it's not mine.
 
There's also a compound effect here, one I've noticed outside of music circles. "The cloud" is nothing more than someone else's computer and hard drive. If it's stored elsewhere, I don't need to store it locally, right? So by now, I thought we would have terabyte iPod models to hold all the media we could desire, but we don't. Manufacturers everywhere have taken a slide back in the amount of space they are willing to ship with their products by pushing "streaming" and "cloud services" as an alternative.  If I wanted any half-decent media device with internal storage, I have to either buy something that supports SD cards or import the device from Japan and pay a heavy price tag. Shrinking local storage only incentivizes people to give in to streaming, which I think is a bad development even if it's not pointedly malicious. (Not to mention most of these companies introduce data caps to limit the amount of streaming you do, also shared with other forms of "data", effectively putting an upper cap on how much music you can listen to...as opposed to having the music on an MP3 player where you can listen to it until the hard drive dies. Even if the former limit is technically infeasible, it's still there...)
 
Note the emphasis on "control". I don't have the obsessive need to own something as long as I can do with it what I want, when I want, where I want. Buying CD's versus buying digital copies is one and the same to me, especially when my entire collection lives and breathes digitally. I can control my digital collection and it's something I know all of us here have in common. If I pay for streaming, I'm not paying for a copy of the music. I'm paying for the right to stream the music at a predetermined bit rate for a set amount of time, in specialized locations.  I can't even stream and take the subway because the signal will cut out once I go underground!
 
Perhaps I'm more sensitive to this because I've identified with a music scene that thrives and depends on ownership of physical media, but streaming is just not for me.

Makes sense. Schoolboy's Q second album, I think, was removed from spotify with no explanation. At the time I didn't give much thought to it, but looking from the consumer viewpoint, that's pretty fucked up. I am not entitled to anything when I subscribe to their service, I'll have to listen to what they want to make available... I admit I'm becoming lazier and lazier, basically all my non japanese music is listened through spotify too, and yeah, we should be aware of that, indeed. Lucky for us, torrents are always there to save the day, I guess. I still buy physical copies of releases I like, but I also think that's a fading trend, pretty soon releasing physical copies of albums will be limited to collection editions and etc. abide to the technology revolution, I guess.
 
About the japanese industry, I think it's a matter of time. Japanese consumer base is the weirdest in the world. They are absolutely open to some technologic innovations, but extremely conservative to some others. They will resist while they can, but will succumb eventually, I think. And that is kind of positive for us in the west, more music will be available to us, when they finally decide to change.
 
 

https://thesmartset.com/why-music-ownership-matters/

A band I follow recently shared the article "Why Music Ownership Matters" and I thought it was an interesting read. Here are a few exemplary quotes, in case you can't read the entire thing:

So, what do you think, does this article have a point?

I must admit, the power streaming companies have over individual pieces of media can be scary and it's something I've thought about before. There was this one older German movie I really liked on Netflix streaming a while back. In physical form, the movie only exists on VHS in the US and region 2 DVDs in crappy quality. Netflix, for whatever reason, had some remastered version in pristine HD quality. But now that the film is no longer available in their online library (to quote the article: this particular movie likely didn't 'justify upkeep anymore'), it's like this HD version never existed. I would gladly pay for a Blu-ray version, but it's simply not offered. Maybe I'll never get to watch it again and that sucks. Sure, that's just one movie, but think about the bigger implications of streaming's role in archiving.

I will say, one aspect that seemed downplayed in the article is the material difference between downloading and streaming. Both are digital, rather than physical, but remember, this article is making the argument that the shift from 'ownership' to 'streaming' is the more significant one. So, I would think downloading technically falls under the category of 'ownership' (you have file ON your computer hard drive), rather than 'streaming.' These days, I would say about 80-90% of my non-Japanese music listening is done via streaming, like Spotify. Is there some difference in that culture of listening via streaming versus listening by downloading?

And since this is a Japanese music forum, what can we make of this article? Do you think the general 'Japanese music industry' or particular Japanese music scenes are still promoting music ownership over streaming?

Discuss!

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

Was this too obvious?
 

 
The evolution from this to this in five years time always wows me

Misa has also had a pretty fun transformation. Active since 1997 and is now producing bands at white side group.
 
Misa (→嘆キ使徒(Nageki shito)→Da’vidノ使徒:aL (Da'vid no shito:aL)→Klein Kaiser→架空ノ人々 (Kakku no hitobito)→Aioria→RusH→バビロン(Babylon)


 
 

this is a fun article. i submit for your consideration basically everyone in ass'n'arrow except the vocalist who i assume has a real job now (photo is merely an estimate)



(l-r Yuze/ORCALADE, Takaki/ORCALADE [ex. deathgaze], salaryman, #FreeAkinori/lynch. [ex. meth. with our boy Johannes])
 

when i saw versailles earlier this year, hizaki forgot his first of like five solos when they played Silent Knight. maybe forgot isn't the right word, but his muscle memory got sort of lost after a phrase or two and his left hand was out of position, and he just kept playing to save face through it, the entire time staring out deeply into the audience, as he tends to do during many of his solos. like it was bad, out of key notes and then a really nervously improvised 'oh shit' recovery part after for fifteen seconds or so. it was the only part of the entire show where the musicianship was less than perfect from any of the members.
 
but anyway, while it was happening and he was staring into the audience, he locked eyes with me for like a second or two as soon as he seemed to start messing up and it was a very profound moment for some reason. it was just like a "oh shit, hizaki's not a god, but hizaki is actually a human being like me that makes mistakes" moment. psychologically as if i  watched an idol die in front of me
 
felt as if i had like successfully walked through a wall or something akin in mental weirdness.

And -Eccentric Agent- - Blaze (missing when Ikuma was a great singer in a great metal band)
 

I fell out of the Visual Kei scene in 2010 because all of my favorite present bands were disbanding or going to shit. I fell back into Visual Kei in the last two years because of a discovery/re-appreciation for all of the gold in the late 90s and early 2000s.
 
While I don't have anything present or new to look forward to, I keep finding new things I love from the past. All of my favorite bands I discovered in 2016 were ones that disbanded 15 years ago! And despite that, they make me feel like I've really gotten into VK again.

when i saw versailles earlier this year, hizaki forgot his first of like five solos when they played Silent Knight. maybe forgot isn't the right word, but his muscle memory got sort of lost after a phrase or two and his left hand was out of position, and he just kept playing to save face through it, the entire time staring out deeply into the audience, as he tends to do during many of his solos. like it was bad, out of key notes and then a really nervously improvised 'oh shit' recovery part after for fifteen seconds or so. it was the only part of the entire show where the musicianship was less than perfect from any of the members.
 
but anyway, while it was happening and he was staring into the audience, he locked eyes with me for like a second or two as soon as he seemed to start messing up and it was a very profound moment for some reason. it was just like a "oh shit, hizaki's not a god, but hizaki is actually a human being like me that makes mistakes" moment. psychologically as if i  watched an idol die in front of me
 
felt as if i had like successfully walked through a wall or something akin in mental weirdness.

Panic Channel - Kodoku Mousou
 
 

Welcome to the forum!
I'm hyped that people are actually make it on here after my panel. That thing always takes so much more time that I ever expect them to, but to know that people enjoyed it makes it all worth while. Honestly, if you have any feedback for me, I would love to hear it as I am always trying to improve for the following year.