Kaleidoscope

I think I'm going slightly off-topic here, so I apologize for that, but this seems like a good time to mention this anyway.
 
I've always found it a little perplexing that people often tend to consider electronic software, turntables, and other things associated with electronic music to somehow not be instruments. I mean the literal definition of an instrument is "a tool or implement, especially one for precision work". In a musical context that essentially just means a tool that you feed inputs to to generate music. A voice, a flute, an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, and musical software are all instruments; they're just tools you feed inputs to generate a desired sound. The only thing that changes between them is how 'artificial' they are in the sense that some are entirely driven by natural means (the voice), some are a fusion of natural and artificial elements (an electric guitar), and some are primarily artificial (musicial software), but all of them still need a good talented musician feeding them inputs to create truly good music.
 
I think by arguing that, due to the increasing prevalence of electronic software and the like, musicians are
is a bit of a dangerous train of thought. Mainstream pop music has been doing this for quite a while now, long before electronic software became as extensive as it is today. The fact that mainstream pop is incorporating more and more electronic elements shouldn't be conflated with the mistaken belief that all music made with electronic instruments follows this approach of making music. The truth is that great musicians will produce great music no matter what tools they use, and if anything the only thing determining their choice of instruments should be the aural qualities of the music they're trying to make. There are plenty of really talented musicians making really brilliant, primarily electronic music. At the same time there are plenty of musicians making music with more traditional instruments that, as @Zeus said, is utter garbage.
 
Basically I think we should pull away from assuming that the development of electronic music is one of the main contributors to the decline of VKs popularity; at least not in the sense that music created with these sorts of tools is inherently more simple, catchy, and poppy than music created with more traditional instruments - that just feels snobby to me. It could have contributed in the sense that musical fads have transitioned from the emo/scene music of the mid 2000s to the DJ/Club music of today, but implying that this transition is the result of some sort of inherent flaw in electronic instruments versus traditional instruments feels wrong to me.

I'm surprised that 2009 was the peak. It was already around that time I was complainin' how there's no good shows to attend lol. With that said, those shows that we did have sold very well and a few bands could even venture to have gigs in the second largest city of the country as well. 
I reckon the pop culture peak of visual kei in Finland was in 2007-2008 when the odd few bands made the telly and got gifted some magazine space. Shows were packed, the fashion was wild, no koreans gnawing in on the real estate, events that were associated with visual kei could actually be held at relatively low risk.
 
 
What's up for debate though, is how the new fanbase of the peak years wasn't able to recover from the crucial wave of hiatus', disbandments and stylistic changes that the most popular bands went through around the turn of the 2010's. Everyone should recall how often one heard people lamenting on the state of the scene with ambiguous claims of a lack of X, Y and Z, setting the scene for the gradual petering out either to the clutches of the koreans or just general normalcy. This is the way of the flesh for a fad certainly, and nobody is able to sustain creative output nor popularity for an extended period of time, but that's not all that there is to it. I suppose among great many other things, it's not unjust to consider public merely as fickle if their visual kei habit was dependent on the existence of Dio and Unsraw. Visual kei on the internet had good enough infrastructure to allow these people to discover new and old bands with relative ease, but one should still never underestimate the stupidity and the incapability of the rank and file to utilize such tools perfectly well in their disposal. There are still people who'll waltz into a conversation, feigning willful ignorance, saying "OH THESE BANDS OF TODAY AREN'T LIKE THE GIRUGAMESH OF YORE. SO WHAT HAPPENED WITH THAT VISUAL KEI?". This means that relative interest is there; they haven't forgotten about it, so what gives? 
 
A certain contributing factor that I don't think gets brought up enough is the bush league organising and the sheer ineptitude of the promoters. The fad really blew its wad during the two years it was at its peak, and it wasn't sustainable. Absurdly dumb, dead certainly set for failure, shows got booked even as late as 2015: and anyone with a lick of sense ought to know that in the long term a no-show is always better than a small-shit show. When you're flopping the proper course of action is never to keep on flopping until you can flop no more, but to change the approach. Rest assured a lot of money and contacts have been squandered by idiots already one foot out the door. Unsraw's European tour is a classic example, and Merry's a more recent one. If you're not able to project that there's no demand, and that by booking this there'll be no demand in the future, then you're simply not helping.  
 
The networking on the local level wasn't great and at its worst there were even open divisions between the fanbase of privileged rich blogger cunts and those who took the train to shows from their shit provincial towns who could barely afford the mcdonald's and second hand converse ( I confess my dislike of the former, but I'm not merely projecting it. I heard many other people voice it also, completely unprovoked by yours truly. ) When enough shows and events are abjectly booked to fail with a lack of camaraderie to match, the rot is aggravated to spread into the brain, and eventually even the life support in form of a Gazette european tour won't do you no good. Their 2016 show in Helsinki did not sell out. That's equal to the sky falling out in visual kei terms.
 
A curious example of grassroots level organising seemingly done correct: take a look at the pictures of SANA's recent solo tour from from the backarse of eastern europe. Going through all those pictures you'll notice that while the central and western European crowds are only a handful at best, the Russian and Ukrainian shows pull a kind of a crowd that man of SANA's stature has no right of pulling. I'm terribly interested to find out how they've managed to do this. The only reason I can manage to come up with by speculation alone is that the fans of "Japanese stuff" are so organised, if not rabid, that when something is organised, enough effort is done that it'll pull enough solidarity to maintain the scene's health. I swear to God one of those Sana crowds has equal heads to what EAT YOU ALIVE or heidi had here in the past three years. It can't be that there's more fans of this shit there than in here just by sheer chance, luck and coincidence. 

Noticed something interesting when I was exploring worldwide trends for the search term "visual kei" on google - that tiny spike earlier this year just happened to be when youtubers react to visual kei came out:

 
So visual kei is dead. And at the rate it is going now, will be even dead-er; A scene stagnating on the same looks and sounds, rarely venturing out musically if at all. But it wasn't always that way. Although it would be  appropriate to refer to the 90s golden era of vk to remind us of how opulent the scene once was, I want to bring back memories of 2009.
 
In October 2008, Kerrang ran a feature on jrock, publishing an article predicting jrock to go big in Europe in 2009.
And sure enough, google trends highlighted the correlation clearly, confirming that the search terms "j-rock" and "visual kei" did indeed peak between January and March 2009.
 
However, following vk's brief global success was a period of near-exponential decline - to what we see now as the lowest point of popularity vk has ever experienced in a 12 year time-span. Even that spike in August wasn't enough to break above 2004's lowest point.
 
Personally, I'd been a passive fan of visual kei for many years prior to 2009, but it wasn't until 2009 that I became fully engaged. One prominent catalyst was Japanese blogging platform Ameba launching its virtual community ‘Pigg’ that year, becoming a game changer in the way fans and bands could interact. Popular musicians were also given accounts powered by ameba, a la twitter's verified personalities.
 
I remember 2009 as a year that several vk bands were going major and gaining international recognition. It was no surprise that vk reached its global height by being much more accessible through social media and other digital channels. This momentum seemed to be gaining quickly until 2010 brought a sharp turn of unfortunate events within the scene and the emergence of kpop poached a large part of the international vk audience.
 
However, the situation in Japan is a bit different, as vk has been pretty steady since it had already declined by the turn of the century. The search term "ヴィジュアル系" on google trends says as much.
 
A few years ago, major labels published all those visual kei cover albums probably in an attempt to raise the relevance of visual kei, but the hype had pretty much died by then. The drought of talent and variety meant that each band was no better than the other, and was enough for many people to lose interest. Stricter piracy laws also meant that music had become less accessible, with people being reluctant to pay the exorbitant prices of some CDs. Not to mention the discontinuation of many vk magazines as an indication of the scene's current degradation. Marketing and business models that worked in the 90s and early 00s struggle to find significance in the present day, yet management has not evolved to adapt to current trends (or have done so poorly).
 
Now that the last of the influential underground vk labels is defunct, vk doesn't have the backing and budget as it once did. X Japan and Luna Sea are like the only lifeline left for vk - there can't even be a vk festival without either X Japan or Luna Sea in the lineup.
 
I remember reading an interview where Yohio mentioned that he kinda killed western interest in vk, but I don't particularly attribute that to those western vk acts damaging the reputation of this uniquely japanese scene. Bands such as D'espairsRay, girugamesh, the Underneath, Rentrer en Soi, Dio, UnsraW and Black:List etc who laid the groundwork for vk to make its mark in the west are no longer around. I'm surprised lynch. didn't carry the torch.
 
I don't want this thread to sound too much like #resurrectvk, but instead I want ignite a discussion (and maybe create a dialog) - how did the vk boom of '09 affect you in your country, what could've been done differently, or the best things to come out of  that little modern renaissance of vk history.
 
 

Many bands on the list come and go, but here is a recent one with active bands:
 
1. DADAROMA
2. Dir En Grey
3. DEZERT
4. Gallo
5. ALSDEAD
6. the god and death stars
7. Hollowgram
8. Nocturnal Bloodlust
9. Mejibray
10. Codomo Dragon

Glad if I was of any help! Yup, that sounds like the right approach It's always good to analyze one's recordings (even though it becomes bothersome if you start regretting uploading something after you find more and more flaws ahaha), sometimes it also helps to look at your notes in a program like Melodyne, for me it helped to see where I usually go flat or sharp!
Ah yeah, with the throat singing you probably mean the false chord stuff, lots of singers use it for growling - I find it rather uncomfortable and prefer to use fry screams (there's lots of tutorials for that on YT, it's pretty cool because you can transition to raspy and clean singing very quickly with it), but it sounds pretty brutal if you can master it.
 
I haven't listened to AvelCain that much, but from what I remember he sounded fine. I think it's good to pick up bits from all singers you come across and like, there is always something you can learn even from singers who are technically not that good

This is probably the most helpful thing I've seen all day~. Thanks so much!
I really do wish to get a teacher someday to help me reach my full potential. The way I try to notice my flaws is I record myself and I see what I need to improve on. I also try to research the techniques as much as possible, and learn different techniques that even if I may not use, will still really help me. Like, for example, I learned Tuvan Throat singing because I knew it would help me learn to scream and growl correctly (Also I happened to go through a small phase where I had an interest in Mongolian and Tuvan music xD)
I can actually hit the high notes of Saku without falsetto, but I prefer to use it since it makes me sound more feminine, though I can also hit a pretty lavender sounding tone without falsetto, but it involves me singing similar to how Karma from AvelCain sings, and I don't think I should try to sing like him, since I'm not completely sure whether he sings correctly. 

"I don’t really understand music theory. I know almost nothing about chords and scales."
 
This explains a lot. 

Day 25: 鵺-chimera- by ギルガメッシュ (girugamesh)

 
Release Date: 2016-01-20
Label: Danger Crue Records
Genre: Visual Kei/Metal
 
 
Impressions from @doombox:
 
 
Impressions from @togz:
 
 
Impressions from @ShanethVarosa:
 
 
 
Impressions from @emmny:
 
 
Impressions from @Ito:
 
 
Sample song:
 
 
Buy the album:
CD Japan | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon

(Before that, I’m so sorry the length of this introduction reads like an essay but please bear with me ><)
 
I have many interests, but let’s talk about visual kei as this is the one constant that has taken up most of my life.
 
2009 was a time of change for me and visual kei. Ameba launched its virtual community Pigg, which instantly sucked the life out of me and as it turned out, so many vk bandmen had no life as well.
 
t's embarassing to talk about it now, but as teenagers with nothing better to do with our time, my friends and I would send as many friend requests as we could to band members and ‘stalk’ them whenever they logged online. Suddenly vk had become so much more intimate as we could interact with vk bandmen in real-time like never before.
 
But pigg was more than that. Some of my fondest memories have been the designated VK showroom where you could stream youtube videos to a crowd, meeting new people in the club rooms who share a common interest and of course having to witness the silly antics of some of those bandmen. I got to know a lot of bands that I would otherwise never had found out about, had conversations, learning about their personalities and interests. I also got to learn that some of the musicians in the darkest and heaviest bands have the cutest personalities behind the keyboard, fawning over the colourful array of virtual fashion items pigg had to offer. 
 
(Asanao from lynch. case in point)
 
It was a fun and unique experience. And at the same time, information was not only more accessible than ever before, but more abundant as well, and keeping up with blogs, news, forums, and playing pigg consumed every moment of my every day which back then, I had the time and youth to do so.
 
But eventually, I burnt out.
 
I attributed my losing touch with vk to information overload. It’s been more than 4 years since I stopped going on pigg and ameblo for good, but those few years of intense dedication, even today, felt like an aeon. 
 
I used to make a lot of parodies of bandmen, and loved deduction and connecting the dots - which bands had photoshoots at which set and making 6-degrees of separation connections between members of different bands and loved hearing stories from the past.
 
I also had a enthusiasm for drawing, having drawn over a ton bands over the course of 2 years between 2011 and 2012, but suddenly it’s 2016 and all I have are 3-year-old drafts and unfinished sketches. 
 
Everything had been halted because life kinda got in the way… shattered-tranquility had long stopped being my home page and my internet’s search history doesn’t remember vkdb.jp anymore.
 
Hmm.
 
So in that gap between about 2012 and now, I had the mother of existential crises, questioning whether I was really going to follow vk for life.
 
But my passion in the music is genuine and still alive.
 
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been disconnected from the community that I love for far too long, and I don’t want that. I don’t want to forget the memories I’ve made, the bands that I’ve followed, the stories I’ve heard and the things I’ve learned along the way - be they good or bad. I don’t want my interest of VK to die, and I don’t want to stop making funny content about VK forever.  
 
(And most importantly, I don’t want to be the only VK fan in Australia that I know. So if you’re from Sydney, please hit me up so I don’t feel lonely :3)
 
I want this to be the place where I can share my knowledge about vk so ask me anything and I hope to relearn what I’ve lost these past few years. And once again, I’m astronomically sorry about the length of this introduction (I hope it was bearable).
 
Merry Xmas btw

Merry Christmas from DADAROMA
 
 

Day 20: 「最高の食卓」(Saikou no shokutaku) by DEZERT

 
Release Date: 2016-01-20
Label: MAD FACE RECORDS
Genre: Visual Kei
 
 
Impressions from @emmny:
 
 
Impressions from @ghost:
 
 
Impressions from @tetsu_sama69:
 
 
Impressions from @Ito:
 
Sample song:
 
Buy the album:
CD Japan | Amazon

100% this. Kyo is a singer who has always used techniques before had learned to control them. I personally like this approach and follow it myself, but it is sometimes risky and often shows at live performances if you do songs that you can only sing in the studio.
 
As to your issue, I went throught really similar thought processes too when I started with singing - thinking that my range and voice might be extraordinary, talking about it a lot and feeling the need to express it. And I think it's not necessarily a bad thing  Especially when you just started out singing, it is important to have some confidence and believe in your abilities. However, a tip I can definitely give you is to look critically at your vocals and not lose sight of all the flaws you have - and I assure you, just as I still have them, you have them too. Without a teacher, it's actually fairly hard to notice them if your ear is not yet trained and accustomed to what your voice does, so it definitely helps to get some professional feedback on your singing!
 
To answer your initial question: Yes, it is easy for trained tenors who have the basics of belting (basically powerful singing if you are not familiar with the term) down to hit most of the notes in Saku, it's not exceptionally high except for that high part towards the end of the song. In general, as you said, pretty much everybody can theoretically learn to hit high notes with certain techniques, but it will sound different depending on your voice type. I have a fairly low voice and my voice gets a fairly piercing and thin sound when I go really high - the trick is to use your head voice and mixed voice for the very high notes (not falsetto, every guy has that by default and it's usually weak and disconnected). From my experience, I'd say that it's actually harder to learn to hit super low notes (like actual low notes, Asagi from D doesn't sing very low most of the time, he just has a dark timbre). I can sing around Kyo's highest notes (you can hear it from 1:16 onwards in my example, sorry, it's a fairly old cover since I don't have any recent high ones), but I cannot keep up with his super low notes even though I'm a baritone.
 
Turns out I wrote a whole essay, but I hope it helps! Good luck and have fun practicing
 

100% this. Kyo is a singer who has always used techniques before had learned to control them. I personally like this approach and follow it myself, but it is sometimes risky and often shows at live performances if you do songs that you can only sing in the studio.
 
As to your issue, I went throught really similar thought processes too when I started with singing - thinking that my range and voice might be extraordinary, talking about it a lot and feeling the need to express it. And I think it's not necessarily a bad thing  Especially when you just started out singing, it is important to have some confidence and believe in your abilities. However, a tip I can definitely give you is to look critically at your vocals and not lose sight of all the flaws you have - and I assure you, just as I still have them, you have them too. Without a teacher, it's actually fairly hard to notice them if your ear is not yet trained and accustomed to what your voice does, so it definitely helps to get some professional feedback on your singing!
 
To answer your initial question: Yes, it is easy for trained tenors who have the basics of belting (basically powerful singing if you are not familiar with the term) down to hit most of the notes in Saku, it's not exceptionally high except for that high part towards the end of the song. In general, as you said, pretty much everybody can theoretically learn to hit high notes with certain techniques, but it will sound different depending on your voice type. I have a fairly low voice and my voice gets a fairly piercing and thin sound when I go really high - the trick is to use your head voice and mixed voice for the very high notes (not falsetto, every guy has that by default and it's usually weak and disconnected). From my experience, I'd say that it's actually harder to learn to hit super low notes (like actual low notes, Asagi from D doesn't sing very low most of the time, he just has a dark timbre). I can sing around Kyo's highest notes (you can hear it from 1:16 onwards in my example, sorry, it's a fairly old cover since I don't have any recent high ones), but I cannot keep up with his super low notes even though I'm a baritone.
 
Turns out I wrote a whole essay, but I hope it helps! Good luck and have fun practicing
 

defspiral new single "AFTERGLOW" will be released at 2017/02/22 (2 types)
 
TYPE A (1944 yens) will include CD+DVD
TYPE B (1620 yens) will include CD only

by day, the fine ladies are spending their lives stifled in tiny office cubicles
 
but when tha night falls on the megapolis, their guttural deathgrowls rattle through corporate corridors, scaring the cleaning staff!!!!

I'm surprised at the mild response! 
I thought the song was a jam. I already have the "hentai, hentai" chant stuck in my head. 

While I agree it's not their strongest work, I don't think it differs too much from their older style. The poppier melodies remind me of songs like "shakoujijitsu" (from "memai ni shinda heya") and "keibetsu" (from "Untitled") and the heavy parts still have that distinct Dezert sound (although I agree here that it's lost some of its edge). And it channels the quirkiness of "saiko no shokutaku" with weird tempo changes and Chiaki's strange vocals/murmurs/chants.

I think it's a decent blend of old and new Dezert.
 
strong like/10 

That was awesome, enjoyed it more than their previous stuff!
 
Let's be honest, if these guys were actually Japanese, people would hype them as the next big thing in VK. They sound great, look great (except for that moustache) and Yohio is a better vocalist than 80% of what is currently hyped in VK.

That was awesome, enjoyed it more than their previous stuff!
 
Let's be honest, if these guys were actually Japanese, people would hype them as the next big thing in VK. They sound great, look great (except for that moustache) and Yohio is a better vocalist than 80% of what is currently hyped in VK.

I can't be the only person who cringes his balls off when he wails wataSHIIIVA like a dolt. It's totally a minor gripe and generally totally harmless since I can't understand the lyrics for the most part to find anything wrong with the intricacies of the language.
 
The fact that this does sound like generic new vk is a GIANT step for western visual kei that shouldn't be ignored like it's nothing. I think Yohio is special that this shouldn't be taken a cataclysmic shift in the trend, because I think he is both smarter and more talented than the rest of the scene combined. That aside however, that a western visual kei band put out something this polished, professional and faithful to the fundamental rules of the genre is in my opinion, immense. He struts like a vk frontman should, fucking shrieks and warbles in that syrupy vk melodrama with such confidence that has never before been seen with any of these gaijin bands. I think he is repugnant, but fuck if I don't respect him a whole lot for living the true weeb dream and not flopping completely while doing it.

That was awesome, enjoyed it more than their previous stuff!
 
Let's be honest, if these guys were actually Japanese, people would hype them as the next big thing in VK. They sound great, look great (except for that moustache) and Yohio is a better vocalist than 80% of what is currently hyped in VK.

There was also that fad of oshare kei bands having visual kei alter egos (other than panic channel). Ironically some of them made [arguably] better music than their regular stuff.
 
Ayabie → DEATHBIE
 
DaizyStripper → Frantic Emiry
 
Serial⇔NUMBER → Gothic†Number
 
ZUCK → waruZUCK
 
 

Recognizing pretty much all of these obscure bands shows me how much I used to be into this era, I miss those times
I loved and still love that XodiacK song in particular, their image is so ridiculous yet I still enjoyed it a lot, my favourite VK power rangers.
 
@DisposableHad no idea they sounded that good, I only have "Bastard" in my shelf and it never really got me hooked. Gonna look for their old stuff on here later!
 
 
But isn't that exactly what people would have thought about nu vk back then too? While I do get tired of every band doing the same style, it's no different from the nu metal period and I feel some bands are doing the core thing pretty well in some songs (DADAROMA in their heavier songs for example). But then again, I have always enjoyed Metalcore to an extent, so that might explain why I'm not sceptical at all towards it
Visage's guitar tone is sick by the way, just noticed.