WhirlingBlack

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

Yep, Poland, Warsaw even, and Metal Cave is about 10 min from my home! I can't believe the regrettable state of my fan vigilance >.< 
 
Anyway, that's fantastic news and also yes, please ^^ 

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

From when I hosted my VK club in Warsaw, Poland in July. 

Please keep doing so, submitting them to setlist.fm would be a good idea as well if you have time. This band is going places and it's good to document as much of the early history as possible. 

I hate the haircuts, I hate dancing, and it all sounds the same to me.

蘭図 (Rands) will release their first full album in 2020/01, they'll have a oneman tour as well
 
 

Dir en Grey - Sea of Retards
Girugamesh - The Foolish Mindcore
La:Sadie's - Rebirth

Hey, I live in Sweden, that would be pretty inconvenient if he's playing in France. 

Hey, I live in Sweden, that would be pretty inconvenient if he's playing in France. 

Girugamesh played Omae ni Sasageru Minikui Koe twice during their last live. Two and a half times even since they had to restart the second time.
 
It might not be commonplace in the scene as a whole, but it happens. Especially with newer bands before they have enough material to fill the setlist, repeating their most popular track(s) in the encore is not rare. Look through various setlists for bands first oneman shows if you want.

Girugamesh played Omae ni Sasageru Minikui Koe twice during their last live. Two and a half times even since they had to restart the second time.
 
It might not be commonplace in the scene as a whole, but it happens. Especially with newer bands before they have enough material to fill the setlist, repeating their most popular track(s) in the encore is not rare. Look through various setlists for bands first oneman shows if you want.

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Yup I have the setlist.
 
1. 喜
2. 肉腫と繁殖と不快感
3. Malformation
4. Ambitiosus principles
5. 怒
6. …物狂ひ…なりて
7. 愛憎につき…
SE. EXORDIUM
8. 哀
9. GROTESQUE
10. D.Hymnus
SE. 狂の理
11.「人」と「形」
12. 離人
13. 楽
14. シガラミ
Encore
15. Ambitiosus principles
16. vanitas
 
And the live ended with a short MC from Sho wishing Ryuya and Taishi the best in their future then the announcement video that's now on Youtube.
 
I didn't see any video cameras, but there was someone up front taking photos throughout the live. Maybe the band will post some of them in the future?
I was up front so idk if anyone in the crowd took videos. Probably not, though. 
 
 
Also, completely unrelated. I don't know if any of you noticed but they deleted the PVs for アハレワタ, 初潮, and THE SILENT SONG off their Youtube channel.
I like those songs, but imo I think it's for the best. After all DIMLIM's a completely different band now. 

Me and my homie Ai from gulu gulu 

They will also release their 2nd full album in December.
No details yet though. 

the ultimate cope of not having anyone who wants to go drinking with you lmao

Did you ever just go about your life as usual, and suddenly saw a picture of a visual kei musician/band where you least expected to? Or did you notice an intentional (or unintentional) reference to J-rock somewhere totally out-of-place? I find it pretty fascinating whenever I come across something like this out of its usual subcultural bubble, makes me think whether the person who dropped that bit of VK in there did it knowingly or did it just happen by random.
 
Here, I'll show you what I mean:
 
In 2005 a Hungarian publishing house released a collection of short stories from Russian author Yuri Buyda (Юрий Буйда), titled "Porosz menyasszony" (Прусская невеста/Prussian Bride). The cover ended up being a photo of Mana (MALICE MIZER, Moi dix Mois) somehow...?
 

 
Issue #77 (October, 1998) of Todd McFarlane's famous comic book series Spawn apparently features a reference to X JAPAN on a whiskey bottle. I tried checking online whether this product was actually a thing, but I came up empty. Anyway, looks like ol' Todd might know a thing or two about Yoshiki & co.  
 
 
 

 
I totally stole this idea from a metal forum, but I thought it would be fun to do with visual kei too.
 
Mods: if a thread like this already exists, pls delete this one and merge my post into it.

I'm also in support of gatekeeping like mentioned before.
 
Even the conversation of things like toxicity and other internet fads doesn't belong to any serious scenes and is best kept at the Harry Potter and Marvel Universe communities that people dabble in for an year or two before teetering off. 
 
The lack of effective gatekeeping and scene discipline allows for trend hopping and superficial identity searching normies to barge in and blow in the doors and unleash the absolute worst tendencies in anything. Do you know why clubs have face control? It's to keep out weekend clubbers who are objectively awful and ruin nearly every club in Europe that doesn't arm itself to the teeth with bouncers and rules about cell phones and attire. Fuck, look at what happened to most gay clubs and spaces after all the straights started going to them because it became fashion and some vultures saw they could make a buck. From techno to black metal to rap on the street the music journalist went to excavate them like alien cultures and then brought out the carved up husk for the idiots to consume, to make a mockery of. It's true that the seeds of destruction were already in the commercial nature and historical origin of the music and it can be argued the death of subcultures is an inevitable course always, but isn't like people haven't tried to take them out of that sphere and build genuine communities around them and reinforce the so far latent political subtext that's there to be brought up to eschew mainstream commerciality and normalcy. 
 
To me the subcultures I take part in aren't just some joke you come to experience and then leave a good review on tripadvisor for. They're my life, visual kei is my life, among great many other scenes with which I've worked very hard and listened to a lot of shit for years just to give them the respect they deserve, and those who only come on Sundays or even entertain to think that they have the platform speak their mind without a proper education ought to just get spat on their faces and sent back to the business school they came from. 

From my experience both IRL and online, here are some quick observations based from my own perspective.
 
Male fans tend to be more deeply into the music and as many bands as possible. Most walking Wikipedias of VK (myself included) are male, I find.
 
Female fans are the absolute majority and the span of kinds is much wider there, but I generally don't tend to find as many die-hards when it comes to general scene knowledge as when it comes to the male fans, but rather often specialized highly on one particular band, or just a casual fan. 
 
Most major collectors of physical media tend to be male as well. Except for cheki, most male fans I know don't care for those.