AnchuAnchor

I've been in a mess of bands since I was like 15 or so (at least when it comes to recorded material - probably countless more that never really did much of anything).
 
Was in this band for most of my teenage years/very early 20s (metalcore/post-hardcore, I guess?) -
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vONb1m3vF7M
 
Started this band after that...(atmospheric screamo) - 
 
https://barrowband.bandcamp.com/
 
Played in these bands for a little while - 
 
https://officialweathered.bandcamp.com/ (shoegaze-influenced emo)
https://youfolk.bandcamp.com/ (kinda psychedelic-influenced emo/alternative?)
 
And now I'm in this band (chaotic metal/hardcore) - 
 
https://rottingindirt.bandcamp.com/
 
I definitely miss my younger days of touring and being kind of a careless idiot, but being older and more "stable" has its perks, too, I guess. Music has always been my most consistent outlet and the one thing I used to "define" myself for the better part of my life. I feel a bit more disconnected from it now, but being able to do anything at this point feels positive, whether it's recording new stuff or playing a random local show when time permits. Haven't really ever made any money off of it, at least not in any profitable capacity, so I can't much call it a career, but the length of my involvement with it sort of makes it feel like that.

When I was  15 me and some friends from school would hire a studio on weekends and jam. I played bass back then and I also performed at the Japanese summer fest at school with another friend who played guitar and this girl who could fluently sing in Japanese. It was all for fun, I'm not one bit musically talented  

I have my own little solo project and work on some other projects here and there. My first studio-recorded album is basically done and sits unreleased in a folder on my pc. 

I was in a few local bands and some of our sets got decent turnouts (bare in mind we lived in a small city) but I was always late to join bands so I could never really make their sound my own. The best group I was in was called 'Flock North' and we played political fuelled rock...I had no interest in politics so it was a bit like how The Smiths sang about meat being murder but Morrisey was the only vegetarian.
 
As for now I'm a small time hobbyist producing lofi hip hop and Breakcore although I did have a breakcore track released on a compilation a few years ago which is my crowning achievement. I'm trying to incorporate VK somehow but I'm still finding the best way to do it.

From 2007 to 2011 I played guitar in the band Dark Cherry, formed by a group of friends. We made kinda poppy emo/alternative rock/metal with electronic elements (implicitly influenced a bit by D'espairsRay, Abingdon Boys School, L'Arc and stuff like that). Home-recorded a bunch of crappy sounding demos, studio-recorded two better sounding singles and played a few dozen gigs mostly locally, it was fun.
 
From 2006 to this day I'm in a hobby/"just for fun" music project with my vocalist friend (who is also ex-Dark Cherry) under the alias The 21st Cherry Boys (the name came from BUCK-TICK's song, lol), or T21CB for short. We record stuff at home, in totally random styles that come to our mind at the moment. But usually it's some kind of silly weird pop/rock music coupled with electronics (for a while a friend of ours joined too, he played the cajon). We're doing a 12-month single release campaign this year, tho dunno how far we'll get due to the virus scare, lol.
 
We also had a short-lived project Sunshine Demons with the guitarist cousin of said vocalist friend. We recorded an EP in 2012, kind of a mixture of punk, post-hardcore and pop-rock. We also have an album's worth of unreleased and mostly unfinished tracks recorded during 2018-2019, which we are slowwwwwly working on getting finalized. So far it seems like it will have somewhat of a Latin flair in the music, and it will be a concept record telling a story about cowboys, crime, ghosts, revenge,...stuff like that, lol.
 
From 2007-ish onwards I'm also doing some solo stuff here and there under the name JigsawJohnny, but I'm super lazy so I haven't recorded that much music. Genres range from noise, industrial to hardcore, death metal, post-punk, whatever I feel like. My latest release was a dark ambient record with a dystopian cyberpunk concept last Halloween.
 
Most of the music that isn't totally terrible to listen to for even those involved can be found on Bandcamp.

Me and some friends are starting up one for fun called 紫苑/Shion. We only have a bassist, guitarist and violinist (me). So far we're just planning some covers to show our general skills, and when we have the remaining musicians needed for a real band we plan to actually do something.

How many of you are pursuing a music career or are/were in a band? 
 
 

Yunisan aka grassthreads was the best source back in the day and even now
 

their webshops

Back then, in both ancient and past days of the yore old years, literaly yesterday...

That's an interesting point. I've seen the fact promoted that VK especially is slowly dying from natural extinction because the shock value that it once had is becoming "normal" and hence not very interesting anymore.

Back then? I wouldn't confide in my answer as I was not in Japan but I'd say that bands like L'arc, Buck-Tick, and Luna sea as opposed to pop artists making their debuts were looked at equally by promoters and those looking to market music labels across the country (of Japan), so that's why you saw bands in anime OPs along with OPs made by Ayumi, BoA, and other artists/composers like Izumi Sakai (ZARD), Yoko Kanno, etc. 
 
We know now that VK is harder to produce now, but I'm not as in-the-know to tell you why other than resources drying up (era that died out in the late 90's) and scandals giving the scene a bad image even today. I'm just saying that the 90's marketing boom for all forms of media bled together when it came to how to promote it and what was promoted.

Not sure if this counts as an easter egg but Ao sure loves Prince cuz the main motif/chorus of cali≠gari's song "セックスと嘘" from the 12 album is pretty much a straight-up copy of Prince's "I Would Die 4 U".  
 
 

Not so much an easter egg, but in the interview connected to 13 Shuuji namedrops J.G. Thirlwell's project Foetus in connection to one of the songs on the album. Makes me kinda curious to find out more about the musical stuff these dudes are into lol

I was listening to cali≠gari's Kinjiki the other day when I noticed that in the "drama" part of the opening sketch, if you will, the version of "Fly Me To The Moon" that was exclusively made for Neon Genesis Evangelion can be heard! 
 
From what I've gathered Mr. Ao Sakurai must be a fan of the show 
 
Source:
https://mikiki.tokyo.jp/articles/-/20387
 
Feel free to post about other easter eggs that you may have come across!
 
 

This is still done today by some distributors, but this was how media (music, games, videos) were promoted. 
Regarding the VK music being there, most of what was considered "rock" in Japan didn't have a label (well, maybe you could call it "visual rock") and so X Japan, GLAY, Luna Sea, etc were all treated the same in terms of marketing back then. I thought it was beautiful to see b/c there was no stigma on what you could have for anime OPs when it came to artists we now consider VK like the OP for GTO:Great Teacher Onizuka. I like that it carried over to even later anime of the 00s (like the OP/ED of Death Note) or even stuff from the last decade (this sounds weird lol) like the 2nd OP for Black Butler, it gives me hope that this stigma never existed in the first place and that VK could be promoted in this fashion still.

Yeah lol, thanks user xxRazorN1ghT34 for the mp3 titled "xh8HsajjepicComics" with album art of a jpeg webcam snap of an empty soup can, I will surely discover it....never... I didn't even use myspace because I was too antisocial even, then so nothing was ever saved and I had to search from a notepad list each time (cause I was dumb 😃)

Glad and thankful that you got to recollect all of that! And don't be sorry, I really enjoyed reading your post!
Also, thank you!

For the most 200xs story:
On a 16 bit top down RPG called Furcadia I had been playing since elementary where you could program your own maps / make your own pixel art and things I eventually made a friend from Singapore. She was super into Chobits and got me into it too, which led me searching for midis on those independent anime sites. Turned out one of them had an entire vkei section although I still wasn't quite sure what it was, just that I liked to hear it but I had no idea how to find more aside from slap words into the big search bar and click on every link displayed with varying degrees of success.

Later an artist I started admiring through Neopets beauty contest I followed to Deviantart who would make dinky flash animations for humanized version of their pets, in one flash they used an acoustic version of Tsuki no Uta by Gackt, that led me on a wild search to find more where I ended up on French site radio.blog.club, it was somewhat like a very early spotify in that it built a list of songs you could play based on one artist or word search. (But sometimes you'd get really random shit and a lot of weird bootlegs), imeem was also similar but if someone didn't title / tag a track correctly you just had to guess what it was by the lyrics, to this day there's still a song I wish I could find all I remember is it said something like "ohh gambino" was kinda techno poppy and was probably some anime / H game OP but since Stylish Gambino exists...impossible to search now lol.
We and especially kid me didn't have money to be ordering things in the mail back then except once a year through a magazine, so it wasn't until I was 16 or 17 I started being able to explore the world of online ordering. (Also like I just saw YuyoDrift mentioned TokyoPop was a big one, I'd go to read those at the book store.)

Even though it's fantastic everything is so accessible now and easy to learn of any new music, there's a certain charm lost of finding some gem you have no idea what it is but it's amazing and you're determined to dig out more of it that leads you into a rabbit hole of mystery. Also there was a site around 2002-2006 that was very pink with a cabbit cursor and had some generic anime BG, they had a TON of hosted midis and scans of Sailor Moon / Tokyo Mew Mew, section dedicated to kaomoji, etc, me and my best friend spent an entire day trying to find what it was called / if it still exists but we can't remember, don't know if anyone else does. Even way-back machine couldn't help

LOL fucking Imeem for myspace was so good and so shitty sometimes, but it worked lol
I did enjoy being able to upload my own shit doe for my page but the names people were putting in did suck for those looking for the actual artist.

For me in 2004 it was all about random fansites and message boards.
 
I kinda accidentally discovered VK/J-rock by clicking on an article on a Hungarian website (LD50) that was basically the hangout hub for goth/alternative online culture here back in those days. The article had a bunch of download links for random music videos (in formats that would be considered utter crap nowadays lol) so that's how I got my first taste of MALICE MIZER, Dir en grey, Kagerou, Baiser, BUCK-TICK etc.
 
I then spent tons of time just trying to get my hands on anything I could, both music- and information-wise, so this led me to Sound of Japan which was probably the only Hungarian website dealing with VK at that day (still is, most likely). There were super cool and informative articles there where I got to know about the scene's history, the most important bands, and even some CD reviews/recommendations... and there was a message board. Oh damnnn the Sound of Japan forum. I got to meet so many great and fun people there from all over the country and we were geeking outttttt lol. The admins were also holding regular club events as DJs in the capital city so that was another good way to network with all the cool guys and gals I got to know online. My buddies and I taking hours-long train rides to Budapest after school/uni was over for the week, grabbing a quick bite then off to the run-down underground venue to dance and have fun from 9 PM till 4-5 AM next morning, then straight back home with the first train (okay, I couldn't do this kinda shit nowadays lmao).
 
Next to Sound of Japan, I was also frequenting an international message board Tokyo Nights (old-timers might still remember it) that was more of a catch-all of music genres, but there was some VK presence there too (got to meet a German penpal there who we still keep in touch to this day). There was also another forum which was really really small-scale and unfortunately I can't remember its name but I had some great times there too, full of friendly people.
 
Then somehow torrents became a big thing so the floodgates were open! The Tonberry Torrents site was one of the pinnacles of this. Imagine, instead of downloading crappy low-quality mp3s of individual songs from rotation sites (yes, those were a thing too: basically every week or so they would put up a random selection of songs from various artists) now I could download whole albums' worth of crappy low-quality mp3s, lmao. And then CDJapan came along so then I could buy over-priced CDs and DVDs of said albums, god bless.
 
And then I joined the Tainted World message board and now I'm here with all you cool peepz. ♥
 
(Oh damn, this became long, sorry! But thank you for opening this thread, made me feel very nostalgic. )
 
(And also welcome to MH! )

I was listening to cali≠gari's Kinjiki the other day when I noticed that in the "drama" part of the opening sketch, if you will, the version of "Fly Me To The Moon" that was exclusively made for Neon Genesis Evangelion can be heard! 
 
From what I've gathered Mr. Ao Sakurai must be a fan of the show 
 
Source:
https://mikiki.tokyo.jp/articles/-/20387
 
Feel free to post about other easter eggs that you may have come across!
 
 

How did you search for vk music/scans/content/etc  back in the early 2000s?
 
From what I've been able to find Last.fm must have been a popular site for MVs and audio files.
 
 
 
 

Wow, someone really wants to know this? lol
I mean, I'm glad because it's information that needs to be archived, with plenty of us around still to provide this.
 
My memory is vague as fuck for the late 90's (I was under 10 years old) but it was the cool kids on my block that had access to these magazines (I think from MixxZine aka TokyoPop! and VIZ Media, who were the biggest sources for this stuff) CDs, and VHS tapes that were being converted into early file types that took up the entire HDD lol. There was really no online presence that was being translated for english speakers that I recall because the scene was still nonexistent and the otakus/weebs were more interested in the anime aspect of the Japanese culture (there's a LONG history of the otaku boom of the 90's that you should read up on cuz it was GREAT!). A lot of them were learning Japanese and they talked with Japanese people online that could type in english, which I think is how the sped up birth of forums and subforums on popular websites happened for like Newgrounds, Ebaumsworld, and the one's everybody else has mentioned.
I can text some old neighbors and see if they can provide more info if needed (assuming they still remember me lol).
 
For the early 00's when I actually had my own PC (for "homework" lol), it was mostly blogspots, MySpace pages of fangirls/collectors, major websites like JpopAsia and talking online with just anyone interested in Japanese rock in general. VK was still small imo but bands like D'espairsRay, DEG, and even the GazettE were making the rounds as it was what normal fan girls were interested aside from ayabie, antic cafe, and other Oshare Kei. The music was not entire albums but songs that could be acquired from P2P applications like the ones @saishuu mentioned. Once you got a real understanding of the internet (to which at this point I think most of your PC was virus infested lol) then you we're able to find .rar files and torrent websites like the ones mentioned above. People I knew shared Mixtapes/burned CDs (sometimes with no metadata on them, ugh) to distribute and once files became the norm we just did that.
 
 
 

Also there was a time when people shared a lot on blogspot, though most of the times the files were taken from p2p networks anyway and there was some drama with blogs shamelessly copying links from Tainted World / Monochrome Heaven.
 
If you were lucky enough to live in the German speaking realms then you could mail order japanese CDs from stores like Neo Tokyo, the Japan and Manga shop that spwaned the Gan-Shin records label, which distributed many japanese rock, pop and VK releases in the West. Thanks to Gan-Shin I got releases from D'espairsRay and Dir en grey. Also Trisol brought Moi dix Mois albums to Europe and then there was the Astan Magazine related label which distributed and booked tours for the gothy and darkwave-ish side of VK. Sometimes amazon had good deals on imports as well (got Malice Mizer's albums there). That was all around 2005-2007-ish for me.
 
Then CDJapan came along and not long after I discovered shopping services. The latter had been a thing since the early to mid 00s I believe, but it was very expensive. Warehouse based shopping services like FromJapan or Zenmarket didn't exist yet, you only had the option of asking and paying a person who lived in Japan directly to get your stuff and send it to you. For me that was out of reach, since I got into VK when I was a teen and didn't have much of a budget, I usually bought what i could afford through webstores or physical.
 
I only got into forums like tainted world around '06, so I was never part of the very early ones, like the infamous batsu forums (but I heard quite a lot of it).
 
I too used yunisan a lot… RIP. It wasn't updated since a long time though, while vk.gy looks to be a good follow-up and replacement. I second the use of soulseek. You won't find much VK stuff there anymore, sadly, but if you look for other obscure music from genres like punk, indie, metal or post-punk, then you will likely find it there. Considering that most DL blogs and music sharing sites are dead, soulseek and torrents may be the only places for pirating and grabbing hard to get stuff today.