Yurayura Teikoku is one of the most popular indie band in Japan. They’ve been recording stuff for almost 10 years and they can fill huge venues. Yet they’re almost absolutely unknown in the west. Wait, it’s not weird that they’re not famous in the west, after all they’re japanese. Only dorky hipsters like myself care about japanese music. What’s weird is that even with the dorky hipsters crowd they’re totally unknown.
Once you come here you realize that most of the japanese stuff that you heard about in the west are almost totally unknown in Japan.
Take all the indie japanese filmaker that are considered like medium geniuses in the west like Tsukamoto, Kyoshi Kurosawa, Takashi Miike and all that bunch, completely unknown here. Same thing with bands, nobody ever heard of Acid Mothers Temple or Afrirampo or Zeni Geva here. I went to an Acid Mothers Temple show here and the microscopic club was almost empty and there were at least 10 gaijins amongst the 30 people present. Hell, Kawabata was ordering a drink at the bar when i came in.
When i saw them in Paris a couple of years back, the place was packed.
The weird thing is that japanese hipsters will talk about bands and filmakers that you probably never heard about before. It’s like there’s two completely separated undergrounds, the domestic underground and the exported underground.
Yurayura teikoku was part of the domestic underground, was because now they’re more like on White Stripes popularity level. I saw them live in the Tokyo equivalent of Central Park where they were giving a free concert. There were people everywhere coming from every background. The weird thing is Yurayura’s music is not even catchy. They’re playing this kinda weird repetitive psychedelic-garage rock, you can’t even sing along to.
It’s not like they’re fucking Weezer or anything.How they can move such huge crowd is a total mystery to me.
Now i’m talking about yurayura because recently Pitchfork every dork favourite media has written a review for their last album, Sweet Spot. Oh, and i found this video on youtube which is pretty neat.
Oh and here’s some other Yurayura related links:
Yurayura Teikoku’s american label
Yurayura Teikoku official site
Yurayura Teikoku’s profile on keikaku