Opening with the sound of 8-bit beach waves before launching into flares of chiptune percussion and tone-drags, this concept album keeps things upbeat, crisp, and colorful, whether wobbling along on pitch-shifting warbles, bouncing along on rainbow-like arpeggios, or driving hard into the breaks. Track titles like “Solar Beam // Unicode Dream” and “Glitch Love Fantasy” provide an extra sense of direction to the (mostly) instrumental tunes, and while the composer keeps things compact (with just the last song, “Everlasting Magic Sea”, breaking the four-minute mark), there’s a nice feeling of depth to each piece.
The effects, tones, and beats are layered extensively, but they’re kept from muddying the clarity and impact of each other with some capable channel-juggling. Pleasant and lively, and successful to a surprising degree in accomplishing its aims of merging the vibes of a hot summer day at the beach with early-’90s entertainment electronics.
The first disc of a double album pairing two separate concept albums, JAPSHITFUN Is Dead consists of 100 tracks, almost all of them one to two seconds long. Following the 43-second opening track, “this is the only song that scrobbles so you can stop listening after this", he also stops bothering to edit out the export track numbers from the titles, as immediately noted with “2 fuck editing out the numbers for 1 second songs“. In the absence of content for the songs beyond staticky squealing, a couple of samples, and about 30 seconds of grind, the titles provide the main portion of character, much of it spent deriding various items while being over-the-top in offensiveness.
Tracks four through eight are spent calling things gay, nine through twenty lol’ing at things (e.g., “10 lol at self proclaimed nihilists who have myspace”), and then a slew of mockery for various bands and pieces of ‘00s internet culture (”24 last.fm is full of gays (like me)”, “33 every noise artist tries too hard”) before dropping into keyboard mashing (“50
qweqweqwe adf a”, “53 i’m bored already =I”). Further castigation of others and himself fills the rest, with some being very much of the time (”73 yahoo chat is full of pedos”) and others less so (”86 anal cunt are a bunch of rockstar faggots plus its false grind”), wrapping up with “96 internet noise”, “97 is”, “98 extremely”, “99 fucking”, and “100 gay.”
JAPSHITFUN Presents… Timeless Classics, the second disc, goes simpler with its titling silliness, beginning with “love-ah yu” and adding an extra ‘u’ to the end for each of the ten following tracks. Layering J-pop, sometimes sped up or over-amped, with percussion so thick and fast that it verges on static, the songs from this section hover around the two-minute mark, though the point is essentially made with the first instance.
Together, the two discs are effective as an outlet of disdainful attitude, and pretty well corner the market on mockery of their more extremely niche targets, but the pairing is still more of a curio than an object of actual listening appreciation.
Scrambled Brains 