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cvltic

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Posts posted by cvltic

  2. Posted

    On 11/25/2017 at 5:41 AM, Mr.0 said:

    No passion, no energy, and the singer looked like he wan't to be anywhere but on this stage.

    I had the same experience! I saw them 3 times because they did a tour with lynch. and SuG. I had no desire to see SuG but they were, to my surprise, much more fun to watch than vistlip, who I was originally mildly excited for... Tomo's lack of presence dragged vistlip down a lot for me. Yuh, Umi, and Tohya were fun to watch, but Tomo didn't give off any energy at all. It was too bad...

    Mr.0 reacted to this

  4. Posted

    i'm in AB, originally from SK though... i've accidentally met 1 vk fan in both provinces. that's it.
    there's got to be more in Edmonton since occasionally bands got to the local con but i haven't been personally.

     

    i know hella toronto/montreal fans online, though!

  7. Posted

    what about their stuff as highfashionparalyze? (it's the same fucking band idc what vkdb tells you ok) this project got much better when they balanced improv/compositions further towards compositions imo

    the nagoya kei true fan initiation is going to see gibkiy live and having kazuma blast all the microscopic hairs out of your ear canal by blowing a whistle at full force into the mic

    Tokage, Mamo, emmny and 1 other reacted to this

  8. Posted

    This single is now their best selling single. It's also charted longer than any of their previous singles.

    Although the opinions here are lukewarm on the single content itself, let's put that aside for now... They haven't been able to top MIRRORS in sales for 6 years, and they've done it with a release whose premium edition was essentially a full-length live blu-ray with a bonus single attached -- this is pretty impressive because DVD/BD sales are usually harder to push.

    With their top single being their most recent and their top 4 selling albums all being from their return to their more visual kei roots in 2014 onward (AVANTGARDE, GALLOWS, D.A.R.K., SINNER-EP) they've really made a comeback after their slight downturn in 2012/2013.

    -NOVA-, Ozileras10, rekzer and 4 others reacted to this

  10. Posted

    thank you very much to @emmnyfor alerting me to this clownery

    In a bizarre PR move, tensai. member Karuto will bike (as in, on a bicycle, not a motorbike) from Osaka to Tokyo to promote their free one-man at Ikebukuro Black Hole on 12/11.
    His journey will begin at noon on December 1st from Like an Edison Osaka.

    There are various rules and stipulations, the first involving how much money he'll be taking with him.
    His credit cards will be confiscated, and he will be given 10 yen x the amount of retweets that the embedded tweet receives.
    At the time of posting, that's about ~16,000 yen.

    [Rules]
    ①He must arrive at the goal within 7 days of departure.
    ②He will be given missions to earn money during his trip.
    ③He will distribute tickets for their show to fans he meets along the way.
    ④Money will be taken from him if he neglects to tweet before he goes to bed.
    ⑤He must visit designated stops.
    ⑥Their "super roadie" Yuuma will be sent with him as part of his roadie hazing on guard duty.

    Jigsaw9, Case, nick and 8 others reacted to this

  11. Posted

    2 hours ago, Peace Heavy mk II said:

    do they talk about us there?

    Pretty much no. The only time anything other than individual foreign fans came up that I can remember include:
    -Jrockanonmeme on LJ making Aoi flip out on twitter
    -Dir en grey overseas tour rumors and happenings; like the incident where coffeebunnies posted pictures of herself with the band at a strip club on LJ

    -Tanuki/gossip translation tumblrs being mentioned here and there, particularly in regards to Satsuki drama (which directly involved foreign fans)

     

    It seems like unless our venues of discussion kick up a huge storm and involve both Japanese and foreign fans, no one cares.

    Laurence02 reacted to this

  12. Posted

    21 hours ago, LIDL said:

    I guess whats inside these tanuki boards must have either lots of lulz or cringe.

    I'd say a healthy dose of both, lel

     

    23 hours ago, r... said:

    And I've always, ALWAYS wanted to do a doc about the scene and the surrounding culture. I still hope to be able to do it while some of my favorite people are still alive.

    Honestly, something like this would be the absolute dream.


    Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to read this, I'm so glad it went over well! Eventually I'd like to write about the old roadie/mentor system in VK (but it's been a pain in the ass to research), or do an archive of the older legends/rumors of VK (easy to research but probably going to take 100,000 words to write it all out), it was very encouraging to see that people were actually interested in this piece since it was my first crack at this kind of thing.

    Laurence02, frayed, hotcocoa and 8 others reacted to this

  13. Posted · Edited by cvltic

    I've been wanting to write some of this stuff out forever because I'm a huge digital packrat and I like to archive these types of things... I don't think any of this has been written out anywhere before, but I'm not sure how much people actually care about the fan culture part of VK here, especially the Japanese fan culture, and especially the online Japanese fan culture. But, just in case any of you are also level 50 Turbo Nerds I thought I should post it here. I hope this is a sensible place to put it??

    this piece is WAY too long for how lame the subject is and i'm so sorry
    tl;dr: tanuki is old as fuck and there used to be another tanuki and forums are dead, long live tanuki

    edit: fixed a number i screwed up
     

    Spoiler

     

    A (Not So) Brief History of Visual Kei Message Boards

                   It was not that long ago that the rumor mill in the Western Visual Kei fandom was powered entirely by girls who claimed to have Kyo’s AOL screen name, Taste of Chaos tour gossip, and legends brought to us by Chinese fansites and Altavista Babelfish in a machine translation-based game of telephone. When I first heard mentions of a mysterious message board known as “Tanuki”, the few foreign fans who knew of it were trying to keep it a secret. The link was not to be given out, and anonymous LiveJournal comments that mentioned it would receive replies admonishing the poster for spilling the secret. But as the fandom aged and the overall Japanese proficiency levels raised, it didn’t take long for the cat to come out of the bag.
     

                   Despite its hand in providing us with endless amounts of juice, shitposts and memes about Juka’s predilection for scat, Tanuki still remains a bit of a mystery to most non-Japanese fans. Sure, they know it exists, and that it simultaneously is made up of 100% truths and 100% lies, but that’s about it. Part of this is due to the structure of Japanese discussion forums in general. In this horribly written article I’ll be visiting both the surface-level and underground boards and attempting to archive their history in English before their remnants are wiped out any further.

     

                   Before Tanuki and its ilk were well known, there was 2ちゃんねる or 2 channel, best known as 2ch for short (though it recently rebranded as 5ch). Launched in 1999, the organization of the website remains to this day a hellscape of Web 1.0 design, which was the template for every Japanese BBS for years – hence why Tanuki looks like hot garbage. In its mile-long sidebar there are topic headings with a series of links to pertinent anonymous discussion boards. VK related discussions are split into 2 separate boards: “Visual Bands”, where each thread is dedicated to one band; and “Visual Salon”, the general discussion board. Some bands occasionally made an appearance on the HR/HM board as well if they managed to generate interest with the predominantly male hard rock/heavy metal userbase. But for whatever reason, 2ch's VK boards are basically dead now.
     

                   Unlike Western-style forums with their archives of content that are near-everlasting so long as the site remains online, much of the content on 2ch is ephemeral. Threads that reach 1000 posts are closed, and eventually disappear from the site (exactly like Tanuki, although Tanuki's limit is 2000 and threads back to 2010 can be dug up by searching). Several years ago, there were still archive sites with many past threads available, but these too are starting to disappear. It’s precisely because of this that researching older rumors or Japanese-language Visual Kei discussions is so difficult. It’s also hard to say when 2ch’s Visual Kei boards were established or when they reached their peak, but I distinctly remember it being quite lively around 2003-2012.
     

                   However, 2ch wasn’t the only hub of activity during the 00s  – most bands had their own BBSes available on their official websites, where gya would post under cringy handle names which were generally the Japanese equivalent to Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way. The members themselves would post on these message boards as well in some cases. This lead to drama on more than one occasion, such as the time Tora (A9) posted on Givuss’ BBS to call Shouka from Vogus Image a drug addict after Shouka accused him of being a thief. Sadly, these too are mostly lost.

     

                   These are the surface sites, the ones everyone was expected to know. Sure, 2ch was anonymized and it had its own board, but it required no insider knowledge to access. But while Visual Kei wasn’t mainstream like it had been in the late 90s, it was still booming in the 00s, and its internet fan culture quickly developed several more underground venues for discussion.
     

                   We tend to perceive Japanese fans of being more respectful of copyright laws, but in the 00s there were many more fans exchanging media on public sites. There was a dedicated lyric thread on 2ch that lead to archival sites with splash screens that required passwords or following some arcane trail of hidden links to get to the goods. Personal sites were a common thing amongst gya of that era as well, and many of them would post lyrics from their favorite bands despite the threat of the RIAJ. (Most of these personal sites were lost with the closing of web host mahou i-land, a kind of mobile-friendly Geocities.) There were also imageboards (think of a mini-4chan) known as “uploaders”, where Japanese gya would post actual scans (!) as well as digicam pictures of photosets. (These are all lost too, sadly.) MP3s were the one thing that weren’t traded freely on the Internet, instead circulated on programs like Winny and Share.
     

                   These media-sharing sites were underground, but even a foreign fan could stumble across them with some effort.  Gossip/hook-up boards however, were basically VK’s very own deep web. Just like the first murmurings of Tanuki in the foreign fandom, they were not to be discussed on “mainstream” boards like 2ch. It’s hard to account for how they ended up taking off, but eventually they became boards-that-must-not-be-named: known to any true fan, but kept hush. It was understood back in the day that discussion of bandmen dating was not to be done on 2ch. Perhaps it was too public, too well-known, and too obvious of a place for these topics. “Serious” discussion was for 2ch, but gya had several options for seedy behind-the-scenes discussions: Shitaraba’s Kitsune and Degawa (a thread hosted on Kitsune), and Tanuki.
     

                   Like so many of the bands it featured, Shitaraba is currently on a “temporary hiatus”, but its content is gone. It appears that Shitaraba was the overall message board system, which hosted many topics like 2ch. Kitsune was the board dedicated to Visual Kei, and was apparently primarily used for talking about gya, much like Tanuki still is today. Kitsune hosted a thread called “Degawa” which was used for gya/bandmen hook ups. Even now, Tanuki is split into “Old Tanuki” (the board for hookup threads) and “New Tanuki” (the board most people use for gossip and band threads), seemingly as an evolution of the Kitsune board. Judging from discussion about these boards on Tanuki, Tanuki was derived from these boards, thus why the name is another Japanese animal like Kitsune.
     

                   I’m not sure when Kitsune was founded, but there exists a “nostalgia thread” of sorts about it on Tanuki that was posted on 2010, and the slang used there is much akin to the slang used on 2ch around the early 00s, and the bands mentioned are also from around that time and even older (peak Matina, Soleil, Luciffer's Record). The aforementioned nostalgia thread suggests that this board basically invented gya/bandman hookups as we know them today (in fact, “Degawa” used to be what hook-ups were called in the fandom), and Tanuki is a derivation of Kitsune. It would also appear that the Degawa thread was a huge point of contention between users and the admin of Kitsune, which might be why Tanuki has its hookup threads semi-quarantined. Other hook-up venues mentioned are: “Yurikago” (famous for being frequently by VERY popular bandmen), “Iron Maiden” and “Escape”, but it’s unclear if these were separate sites or threads on Kitsune similar to Degawa.
     

                   Tanuki has almost certainly existed since before 2003, and in my research I found posts claiming that it has existed since 2000, including mentions of meeting bandmen that would have been active around that time (Lareine, Elldorado). There is a complete lack of threads from much earlier than 2010 (edit: although there is a small archive of 2008 threads to be found); I suspect the board either moved or was wiped for some reason. This means that sadly much of Tanuki’s history is gone forever, and we will never find the thread that led to the creation of @peko-crash-trap.

     

                   Tanuki is quite possibly the only true remaining forum for Japanese Visual kei fans in 2017. Shitaraba & co. are long dead, 2ch/5ch is an absolute ghost town, and Tanuki now serves all of their roles. There are VK fans on Twitter, of course, but you curate who you speak to rather than deal with a sprawling community. For the users of MH, and especially any of you who used LiveJournal during the foreign Visual Kei fandom’s insanely active peak, this should sound very familiar. Someday it might fall to the wayside too, but I hope if you’re the kind of dork who finds this stuff interesting that this gives you a little more appreciation for Tanuki, and for how much of VK’s history has been straight up lost to the internet.

     

    hotcocoa, keilu, IGM_Oficial and 36 others reacted to this

  14. Posted

    2 hours ago, desertflower304 said:

    Would I have more luck with them actually receiving it if i placed it in a staff member's hand over leaving it in one of those boxes they apparently have in the lobby for gifts?


    This is the recommended procedure for gifts so it's the best choice unless the band is so small your dude is gonna be working his own merch table. Not sure about flowers, though. Usually the big stands get delivered to the livehouse and the livehouse presumably displays and then disposes of them.

  15. Posted

    6 hours ago, Zeus said:

    What is this SINNERS EP everyone is talking about? For real. I missed something, didn't I?

    as flip as nekkichi's answer was it's also not wrong lmao (except #AKisinnocent). the EP had a number of interesting guest bassists (J, YUKKE, TSUYOSHI from PTP, Hitoki, and OUTRAGE's bassist) but they didn't do anything with them, and the title track was extremely zzz. polished but dull? i'm with Ro in saying BLACK OUT DESTROY is the only standout on the EP if you're considering checking it out but... you could also just skip it.

    zombieparadise reacted to this

  16. Posted

    the whirl's re-record is crazy good. underneath the skin is probably my favorite lynch. release overall and while i mostly loved the melt rerec, i didn't really care for the alien rerec, so i wasn't sure what to expect. but i think they did a great job.
     

    usually i prefer lynch.'s B sides over their A sides, especially since their A sides in particular are written in a specific kind of way for a specific kind of crowd motion/interaction (clapping/fist pumping > headbanging > chorus with sing-along part). but i prefer CREATURE over BLOOD, which hasn't really stuck with me at all. SINNERS-EP was a mild flop for me and this follow up is not my favorite single ever either. (still better than BALLAD tho)
     

    also i didn't realize MH was so down on AVANTGARDE btw, it's second to D.A.R.K. for me but easily outdoes most of their previous albums lmao

    Zeus and nullmoon reacted to this

  17. Posted

    Translated Issei's comment bc it's rife for drama

     

    Spoiler

    Dr. Issei
     

    I'm so sorry things turned out this way.
     

    The reason things ended up like this lies in my lack of considerations towards the members and staff, my lacking as a person, and my inability to grow as a drummer and an artist since the start of DIMLIN.
     

    And also in the fact that I didn't notice these until I was told.
     

    All of the blame lies with me, as I created distance between the members.
     

    But these are all things I have to improve as I continue on living.
     

    DIMLIM was my everything and I wanted to keep going, but all that remains is regret.
     

    I'm filled with gratitude to all of the fans and persons behind the scene who were involved with us.
     

    And I'm very sorry.
     

    I can't consider anything about the future right now but I'll continue with music.
     

    11/9 will be my last day as Issei of DIMLIM, but I'll play our show with all my strength.
     

    DIMLIM will keep going so please give them your support.

     

    emmny, itsukoii, suji and 2 others reacted to this

  18. Posted

    i've been curious about this band because of the tomo lookalike and other totally superficial reasons but this does not sound good.
    a little better production value would go a long way here... did they do their recording and mixing inside of a tin can? the flaccid "emotion~~" in the bg is so sad...

    emmny and suji reacted to this

  20. Posted


    Accident occurred when the band's vehicle collided with another on a highway when the band was headed to Tokyo after a show in Osaka.
    No life-threatening injuries but members and staff were injured from the crash and are cancelling the events listed above. Events after 11/4 TBD.

  21. Posted · Edited by cvltic

    55 minutes ago, jaymee said:

    Cool

    - BUCK-TICK (cool romanization of bakuchiku, or "firecracker")

    i actually hate this name, i hate Gock-Ack or whatever too for the same reason

    other shit that sucks:
    -??? (hatena)
    -single letter bands. S M and D can smd

    good:
    -lapslock band names
    -NEW SODMY

  25. Posted · Edited by cvltic

    The other new song, BLØOD, went up for advanced release on iTunes - only for a few days? - https://itunes.apple.com/jp/album/id1293118555?l=ja&ls=1&app=itunes

     

    It's okay, short and loud in a typical lynch.-way with a melodic chorus. Definitely a song composed primarily to move bodies at lives. There's nothing wrong with it but I don't like it quite as much as CREATURE.

     

    lmao Hazuki tweeted it better than I could: "In contrast with the somewhat fresh CREATURE, BLØOD is a super straight pitch thrown by lynch."

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