Cassette
If you’ve been paying attention to Tokyo’s underground in the past half-decade, you’re probably familiar with AVYSS, a music blog run by Nobuyuki Sakuma, whose seemingly genreless curation spans deconstructed club, indie pop, cloud rap, and everything in between. Since their 1st-anniversary party featuring PAN affiliates Toxe and M.E.S.H. alongside dreamy Osaka vocalist Dove, the AVYSS sound has developed for the past five years in conversation with the world’s musical currents while remaining staunchly its own. The former Jesse Ruins producer has fostered a scene with a penchant for pointillistic synth textures, wispy Auto-Tune melodies, and cyberpunk, 3D-rendered aesthetics; some have even taken to calling it “AVYSS-kei” (AVYSS-style). In his latest record as CVN, Sakuma offers a glimpse into eclecticism of the scene around AVYSS, creating an emotional journey out of hard-hitting drums, neoperreo rhythms, and fuzzed-out vocals from the likes of Milky, BBBBBBB, and RIA.
While Shibuya-kei of decades past combined the warm acoustic tones of bossa nova and lounge with kinetic breakbeats, the AVYSS sound is a colder amalgam of dance and indie sounds; Xeno is no exception. Drops of water, clinking coins, a low whisper: “lemniscate” feat. π begins with delicate sounds that suddenly burst into a cathartic breakdown of overwhelming synths. Alt-idol Milky sings through a thick cloud of Auto-Tune and distortion on the trance anthem “crack my heart,” steady four-on-the-floor giving way to a half-time trap beat as hefty subs congeal underneath her vaporous voice. “I can say” features Aichi noise hooligans BBBBBBB, with a bouncy dembow beat keeping their gibberish vocalizations danceable. “Invisibile forest” feat. DAFTY RORN also coalesces around the dembow rhythm, paying homage to the sonic innovations of the global neoperreo scene.
CVN’s strength comes not in maximalism for maximalism’s sake but in his careful juxtaposition of overloaded and subdued soundscapes. Xeno contains tiny grains of sound that flit in and out, occasionally building into vast monuments that dissipate again into the ether. The record comes to a head on “wicked eye” feat. RIA, which begins with a blistering rubber-band bassline before guitar riffs burst in during the chorus, vocalist RIA offering a touch of pop-punk nostalgia at the record’s emotional zenith. That energy fades into a watery, glitched-out apathy on “witch lemniscate” feat. π, closing things out with a reprise of the opening track. Ending as it began—with a whisper—Xeno unfolds like an origin myth for a desolate sci-fi dystopia, a future foreclosed in hushed tones. But with the creativity on display here, the outlook for AVYSS and the Tokyo underground is much brighter.
