🎧 A Shibuya's Scrambled Sounds Special Announcement

Welcome to this special announcement issue of Shibuya’s Scrambled Sounds.

Nothing too crazy this time around, but just wanted to give you all some updates about what’s going on in the ole SSSounds office (my noggin).

If you want all alarms and no surprises (haha get it!!), read below.

If you like to be shocked, flabbergasted, and amazed at Josh’s wacky world of Japanese music, then feel free to ignore this issue. No new album or EP releases this time.

🗞️ The News 🗞️

Here I go again on my own.

Honestly I was feeling pretty tired and burnt out the last couple of months. However, I have some ideas that I’m hoping will provide the content that you want, while also simultaneously giving me more room to expand this project into the large scale media empire I dream of ✨

• 1 New Album Review and 1 Old Album Review

Rather than trying to find favorite tracks, providing ratings, and writing opinions about 3 or 4 albums each time, I’m going to focus on writeups for just 1 new album an issue. But, the important part is, this will allow me room to provide lots of music recommendations, so you can decide what you want to check out!

For example, there will be 1 new album with a written review, a rating, favorite tracks etc., but I’m still going to provide links and genre descriptions for a few other albums that interested me/you may want to check out. In the long run it should be a win-win situation.

• More Frequent Special Episodes

While I love checking out new music, there is so much older Japanese music I’ve discovered and also haven’t discovered out there and I don’t want to limit my content to just new material.

This means that occasionally, there be special episodes such as "An Intro to Japanese Shoegaze”, “Favorite JRPG Soundtracks” “The History of Shibuya-kei”, etc. I think these will make things more fun for the both of us. JRPG Soundtracks would take me a little bit out of the “underground” theme of this newsletter, but I think I’ve broken that a couple of times already so maybe you can see this thing I do as an over encompassing Japanese music endeavor.

If I continue down that route, I’m considering making a YouTube channel… if any of you think that would be interesting please let me know!

• Community Creation

Let’s be honest, the subculture surrounding interest in Japanese culture/things can be… uncomfortable. While Japanese underground music lovers have been saved a lot of the fetishization and weebifying that anime has gone through, there is still some leak over from that culture into other sections of the internet.

So I want to create a community of people that are interested in Japanese underground music but not because of some idealization of Japan, but because they like the music and the genres/aspects that make Japan unique to the rest of the world. I’m thinking YMO fans than some of the more “gimmicky” Japanese music out there.

This means I need your help! Please feel free to reply to my emails, my Instagram posts, and share my content if you like it. I can’t create this kind of community by myself and I’m vowing to be more responsive than before to help make this possible.

I may provide some more incentive to share in the future, but for now, I can provide many many words of thanks and appreciation ♥️

• Singles Playlist → Album Track Playlist

While I may update the current singles playlist every now and then, I want to focus on album content. There are plenty of other places around the internet where you can the newest singles coming out in Japan (I plan on talking about how I find Japanese music some day), but there really isn’t much focused on new albums.

So instead of focusing on singles, I’m going to focus on tracks from all of the new albums I mention each year (might make a bento playlist too). The playlist will have a track or two from each album I post about, including the ones I don’t write reviews for! Also guess, what, it’s already up and available! You can find links below ⬇️

It will be the perfect place to get a little nibble of everything I bring up in this newsletter.

• Newsletter Frequency Shift (Again)

I said every other week but I wasn’t even meeting that deadline (whoopsie). However with this new format, I think a lot of the workload will be reduced and my motivation will increase.

I’m going to aim for a new issue every week, but I’m not sure if I can promise it until I try. Let’s see how this goes! I definitely think every other week will be more feasible with this format though so here’s to more consistency in the future 🥂

🍵 Piping Hot Playlists 🍵

A collection of tracks from the albums and EPs I’ve talked about this year.

Shibuya’s Scrambled Sounds official Spotify and Apple Music playlists below!

Playlist Links:
Spotify
Apple Music

❤️‍🔥 Thank you! ❤️‍🔥 

As always, thank you thank you sooooo much for reading this issue of Shibuya’s Scrambled Sounds! 🥹

• Rate this issue here: Feedback Poll

• Reply to this email or message the Instagram for comments or suggestions

• If you enjoy this content, please share and like the Instagram posts, as well as forward this email to friends. Your support keeps me going ♥️

See ya next time! Breakfast is ready.

All SS Sounds logos and images were created by local Tokyo artist Mai Moroe.
https://www.instagram.com/maimoroe/
https://www.moroemai.com/