inartistic

For the record, I thought it would be cool to interview these guys because of the Revival Judith connection. For various reasons the interview did not turn out like we planned, but we had already agreed to post it by that point. Once we make a promise, I would rather post one weird/bad interview than break that promise. We’re in a position right now where we’re so small that negative word of mouth from one band could fuck us, I feel. If the concern is that we will just be posting interviews from “jrock” bands: I understand, and I agree. But I want to assure you that’s not the case. I discussed with Brengun at the beginning of this that I would rather post nothing than post non-VK stuff. I think VK-only spaces are rare, and I want to remain one. Brengun has her own website for “jrock” things. We have three interviews which are confirmed and scheduled. All three bands are firmly VK. Our list of bands that we’re reaching out to is all firmly VK. This particular interview was an exception. As for the bands being small: yes, we will have to start with very small bands. I think that’s more interesting anyway, but we also have to be pragmatic and realize that a large band isn’t going to respond to us. I’m not sure if anyone has a problem with that, but I just wanted to put it out there. Our current schedule is a new interview every other Tuesday. So our next will be on 3/3. I think that everyone will be more satisfied with the next ones. But if that’s not the case, keep letting us know.

You're right, looks like a continuous session. Seems like member lineups and schedules are on Twitter at least. I'll dump it on vkgy's Discord so I can remember to add it later. Apparently DAISUKE was in a band called DEVi before that. I didn't know!

Hot take: The initial seed for a lot of people is seeing cute boys in crazy makeup. We need to start spamming Twitter threads with slow motion gifs of [insert guitarist here] sticking his tongue out while looking to the side.

For release information, band history, etc, that can of course go into vkgy. I’d be happy to repost interview translations in the blog too, but I would want permission from the translator first. For everything else, I think your best bet would be to download HTML copies of the pages you’d like to preserve, and just upload them to a server somewhere.

Me and the slags about to pull up on u xx

Rare promo version

What are your thoughts on James Charles

Long time no see!

https://vk.gy/search/artists/?active=1#result And here's a list from an English-language site, vkgy. Longer than the Wiki (and open to contributions, so feel free to help us make corrections if you see anything wrong )

Sorry! Try now?

🎉 Free Stuff 🎉 Hello party people! I'm giving away a few free vk-themed things from vk.gy for the Christmas season. --- 1️⃣ vk.gy Christmas/New Year postcard - All you have to do is PM me your address, for an original vk.gy postcard. If you've created a visual kei avatar at vk.gy, I recommend grabbing one, for secret reasons 🙊 --- 2️⃣ vk.gy 2019 sticker - All vk.gy Patreons (regardless of tier) are receiving a special sticker for the new year. Any new Patrons during the month of December will also receive the picture. (Design is secret 🙊) --- 3️⃣ ATAMA t-shirt contest - I recently designed a VK/headbanging themed t-shirt (produced by @evenor), based on a certain adult beverage. Right now, I'm running a simple follow/like/reshare contest, and 1 person will win a free shirt. Here are the links to that:

@ramrod is living his best twunk life, but we'll never forget the king of VHS rarez 😭💕🙇

Eve (ex-Lycaon) wrote all of AvelCain's good songs, and GOEMON RECORDS was openly searching for composers for ARLEQUIN/PENTAGON/POIDOL. There's also a rumor that KISAKI wrote *all* of UNDER CODE PRODUCTION bands' music, but that's pretty laughable/giving him too much credit.

https://vk.gy/releases/omnibus/583/demo-tape-collections/ https://vk.gy/releases/omnibus/1411/matina-presents-2007-kinenban/ https://vk.gy/releases/omnibus/3171/matina-20th-anniversary-memorial-cd-rare-track-collectionz/ All three of these are great. The 2007 one has a really solid selection, and the 'demo tape' one has a huge amount of rare stuff in great quality. The 20th anniversary one has a good mix of good tracks and rare tracks--and it's the only one you can reliably buy anymore. I also highly recommend this DVD if you're looking for live footage: https://vk.gy/releases/omnibus/6764/lorelei-bootleg-dvd-series-vol-2-matina-presents-1999-1999-5-23-shibuya-on-air-east-2nd-press/ There's another with great Madeth gray'll footage as well: https://vk.gy/releases/omnibus/6765/lorelei-bootleg-dvd-series-vol-3-osaka-rock-summit-1999-12-29-osaka-big-cat/

Me fighting off the haters on my way to buy my 18th copy of Gensoukyoku

But did they ever say what was in the basement

Maybe this is the gaijin in me, but I feel like KAGEROU, Kagrra,, and D'ESPAIRSRAY have to be on that list. Three renowned bands, two whose vocalists are deceased, and the third whose vocalist doesn't sing anymore? Yaaa (Also, any native English speakers wanna unpack that last sentence and tell me if it's grammatically correct? The fuck.) Ooh and now my brain is percolating, what about [YUKIYA bands here]? Kαin is in that weird spot where they're certainly not the most popular, but YUKIYA can sell a one track CD for $200 at a live, have it sold out, and then appear at auction the next day for $400 and people are actually paying for it. That has to be the actual meaning of “cult favorite” imo, which must make them legendary(???).

Thanks for the interesting responses! It really does seem like the only "foolproof" way to know is to ask people who attended lives of each band, which is obviously not possible on a large scale. But for now, I think I'll keep the "venue size over time" charts on artist pages, as it's an interesting metric to look at nonetheless. Incidentally, the idea of tracking downloads to gauge foreign popularity is brilliant. MH needs to implement this, stat

Hi all! Two questions, inspired by a chat with @cvltic. --- First: for visual bands, which statistics indicate popularity? Obvious ones are “ticket sales × release sales,” but what else matters? Capacity of livehouses at which they play? Capacity of livehouses at which they hold oneman lives? Number of sponsored/oneman lives held? Number of CDs released? Number of tanuki threads? Price of releases at second-hand stores? Length of activity period? etc. --- Second: without raw sales data, how can we approximate popularity? We don't have ticket/release sales, but we do have lots of other data, via visual kei library vkgy available on iTunes. My hope is to compile/weight that data and automatically assign a rank to each band (as we overseas fans are notoriously bad at judging actual popularity). Here's what I have so far: Average capacity of livehouses at which the band plays. (Could be improved by weighting sponsored events/oneman lives, but how?) Number of releases (excluding free releases?). Number of releases which vkgy users own. (Anyone with a vkgy account can add releases to their collection to make this stat more accurate!) Number of releases which vkgy users want. Average livehouse capacity is already pretty promising (see Syndrome vs Cell no.7 vs ARLEQUIN), and will become more accurate as more data is added (let me know if you'd like to contribute). But I think those other statistics could be useful if weighted properly; I'm just not sure how to do it yet. Before I make some monstrous algorithm that magically gives all of KISAKI's bands an S rank, I'd love to get some input from you guys!

My thoughts/shameless cross promotion TLDR: PSC will prob close to erase debts, Tomomi still retains rights to Gazette's stuff, business as usual for Gazette and everyone else: get fucked.

Riku luvs Kiyoharu so I wouldn't be too surprised. Either way, I'm sure it will be a demo of the worst quality that isn't even worth listening to 👍

Inb4 I turn this into a self promotion thread Here's the vkgy YT account, where I occasionally upload bad unboxing videos and random live clips. Here's one where a girl makes up choreography/exercise routines to vk songs. To be completely honest I initially subbed because I figured it'd be dumb as hell, but she actually does a good job, and my fat ass certainly isn't jumping around for four minutes without looking like a complete mess. I'd love to find more vk-related channels that aren't just music uploads, but most of them seem super cringey :X