What Inspired Me

A few artists from Japan's indie scene deserve far more attention than they get. Here are three I keep coming back to — and why.

1. Why Serph's Music Is a Life-Staking Masterpiece

Animators know exactly how insanely difficult it is to create high-level animation. It's the same with Serph's music.

Listen to it through high-quality speakers and you feel as if you're bathed in a flood of sound. The textures shift in highly complex ways, layered over and over to build the track. Every single sound is finely chopped, stacked hierarchically, and scattered across the timeline — almost like frame-by-frame animation. The flow is controlled with that same multi-layered precision.

It's a world you can never truly access through cheap smartphone speakers.

Serph spends endless hours on this kind of obsessive micro-editing, fully aware that this style will never go mainstream or make him rich. It is, without a doubt, a life-staking creation.

When you listen to his music, start by focusing on the drums. You'll quickly notice the pattern almost never repeats — it keeps shifting, track after track. There are also moments where the piano breaks into fast, intricate arpeggios, driving the song forward and weaving its own rhythms on top of everything else.

The way he builds rhythm — pulling your whole body into motion — is brilliant. It's like a kaleidoscope.

Start here: Serph's track “Soda” is the perfect entry point.

If you like “Soda,” you'll also love the track that follows it on the same EP, “Coquettish Bomber” — my personal favorite of his entire catalog. It takes a chopped-up vocal sample and turns it into a gorgeous, unexpected melody.

His music feels like animation in sound form, and Japanese animation is already loved around the world. I'd love to see more people discover the music that carries that same spirit.

2. The Most Beautiful Melodies in Post-Rock, From Japan

miaou's music is built on stunning melodies and carefully crafted song progressions, which sets them apart from most other instrumental post-rock bands. Their songs aren't built on the typical slow burn toward a wall of distorted guitar — melody leads, not noise.

Even within the Japanese music scene, they remain a minor name. But looking back at the instrumental rock boom of the early 2000s, I'd argue they wrote some of the most remarkably beautiful melodic progressions of any band in the world during that era.

I also love that their drummer and bassist are both women — power playing like theirs is still rare for women in the post-rock scene, and what they bring to the rhythm section is genuinely awesome.

Watch their live performances and you'll notice electronic programming is kept to an absolute minimum — it's all played, in the room, by the four of them. I especially love watching them form a circle on stage, listening closely to one another to lock their rhythms into perfect sync.

And this is the another piece of there's great live performance

3. A Japanese Rock Band You Need to Know

The lyrics Spangle call Lilli line sing don't always make conventional sense in Japanese — every word exists purely in service of the melody.

Of all the Japanese rock bands out there, I think they have some of the most outstanding melodic writing. Everything in their music is built around melody first.

The members met at art university, and each one also has an independent career as a designer or photographer outside the band. That's exactly why they're free to make the music they want, without compromise. It also means they've never had mainstream commercial success in Japan — and that's precisely what makes them special.

Their live performances are worth seeking out on YouTube.