Rubyfire's Music Log 2025
This log captures my thoughts on new listens (albums, EPs, comps, etc.) as well as anything else music-related that feels relevant for me to throw in (interesting singles, concerts, etc.) and is sorted most to least recent.
Info on all of these albums can be found in the 2025 overview tag
on my RateYourMusic page.
Hotel La Rut [破爛酒店]
Joanna Wang [王若琳], 2024
I've heard nerdy-girl cabaret-inflected art / prog pop before, but more strongly leaning into geek rock territory is a bold and delightful move, undertones of country pop included. I feel at home listening to Hotel La Rut having grown up with my parents playing They Might Be Giants and Regina Spektor even though I know absolutely nothing about the Kids in the Hall skip this album is inspired by.
Ever hear an album you enjoy but are even more excited for someone in your life you know will love it to hear? That's how I feel about this album with both my girlfiend and my mom.
goodbye in 9 minutes
SKeinn, 2022
This one benefits from being more on the drum and bass side with no breakcore and a heftier helping of ambient than most sewerslvt clones. Not bad at all. "Romantic suicide" is a track that stuck with me that I'll probably buy for my mp3 player.
Retrospection
anubasu-anubasu, 2020
Euphoric hardstyle should by all means be very much my thing – pretty much perfect for me on paper as a highly melodic, euphoric substyle of a genre known for hard, distorted kicks (though if I want harder, rawphoric is probably the one to dig into further). Retrospection was the highest on the RYM genre chart so I decided to check it out first and I really wish I liked it more! It's not bad, aside from the vocals on "Riot!!!" – it just doesn't really go anywhere. None of it really stuck outside of "How Could You Say (Uplift Mix)" and "How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People."
POP-AID
TEMPLIME & Toto Hoshimiya [星宮とと], 2023
Near-seamless gliding between genres; unique, heterogenous textures tinged with relaxed playfulness and just a touch of the futuristic; lovely-fresh vocals. A few of the little textural moments that stood out to me even among all the undercurrents of lush glitch pop: the cough in "POP-AID"; the vocal check followed by neon guitar in "Tarinai"; the chopper-up guitar at the start of "Melody Smash"; the mathy guitar in interlude "Mu" skipping into glitchiness as it turns into "Hiko."
BreakTek
Qteku, 2023
Incredibly cohesive for a compilation of Soundcloud loosies,; very good to play a futuristic PS1 shoot-'em-up to. The cloud / emo rap-esque vocals on some tracks ("Bitter," "Might Be," in the background of "Glowtek") and the longing Beach Bunny flip at the heart of "lonely with u" are interesting choices for spacey rave shmup fare, but don't detract from the atmosphere or the cohesion (not that these tracks were created with each other in mind, of course).
save room EP
optic core, 2021
Hauntingly beautiful / comfortably off / ethereally melancholic. A moment of respite in an uncertain world, a changed but briefly unchanging space / self in a sea of shifting spaces / selves, an intuitive recognition and understanding of the strange safe (the red sigil on the mirror / the antique typewriter / the red-eyed crow) amongst the strange unsafe. Breaks soothing into ambiance, densely layered textures / realities, an unconscious and dream-like moving through space / memory.
(My review on RYM)
Zelda & Jazz
The Deku Trio, 2024
Really nice mellowed-out jazz, and a refreshing take on "Zelda to chill to." My soft spot for chill Zelda renditions probably brings this album up a bit but it's solid and relaxing.
Sugar Planetarium [シュガープラネタリウム]
Suzushiro [ すずしろ], 2017
Fun cute bitpop. It definitely has its fun cheery bursts of energy, but a lot of Sugar Planetarium is pretty chill for modern denpa after the opening track, which is welcome. As much as I love the hyperactive, noisy side of denpa, it feels really good to mellow out with some relaxed, comfy moe-denpa sometimes :) Definitely going into my rotation!
Mystery Leopard Spins Tracks at Local Nightclub
DJ Warlord, 2023
I was not impressed the first couple times I listened to it, but the next day, thinking about it as ravey IDM rather than some application of bubblegum bass sensibilities and deconstruction to hardcore breaks, it became less bland and more interesting. Music growing on me with time is the norm, and styles like IDM and ambient in particular unveil themselves to you slowly anyway... But I think that in this case I also came into the EP expecting something totally different and then got annoyed about it, which is on me (and/or everyone on RateYourMusic who contributed to its genre tags).
I ended up really liking "Wonderwall," and "Interlude" and "Glowing Exist Sign" were enjoyable, too. :)
Crystal Dispersion [クリスタルディスパージョン]
v/a @ KarenT, 2025
A couple real gems on here, all with their varying mellow, sometimes mysterious, glitchy iciness: "lag..stop breath," "-4°C," "snow drop," and HasegawaMaigo's "Sleeping Awake" remix. Glitch pop is well-suited to a Snow Miku theme and more interesting than generic, concert-friendly Vocaloid pop.
The tuning on "Jadis" is really interesting. Luka is mostly recognizable throughout, but there are moments I can't identify if it's Luka or Rin (or both) singing, and way more moments where, if you asked me to guess who was singing without telling me that Rin features, I would probably misidentify Rin as (V2) Kaai Yuki. Maybe I'm just losing my mind after relistening a dozen times to figure out if I'm crazy, but it really caught my attention. Not particularly crazy about the track but definitely will have to check out more of EO's work sometime.
Fusion Core
v/a @ Milkyway Traxx, 2023
I love when a various artist doujin comp is cohesive and consistent in quality like this. The only song here I couldn't really get into was "Slip Through My Fingers." Milkyway Traxx has definitely caught my attention with this compilation and Rabbit in the black room.
Fusion Core featuring Korean producers' works alongside Japanese musicians' reminded me that I definitely need to check out more Korean doujin artists as well — that's an area of doujin dance music that I'm woefully unfamiliar with but know I would enjoy. Overseas doujin music being embraced in Japan always makes me smile, too. Something really cool about it.
Rusty Doll
doh.ru, 2024
Strange, but often in a good way. Cryptic sounds that feel ambiguously familiar (PS2 JRPGs, jungle atmospherics?) yet somehow off-kilter, a sense of disconnect, an IDM mystique useful in articulating the tension the EP aims to explore: "the mix between organic and electronic matter [...] the feelings robots would have if they turned human." This is, for me, best realized with "She Was Born From a Coccoon" - the birth of a cyborgself; fae, changeling, metal to flesh/ mind to feeling, new heartbeat, new skin, not swapping places but becoming something entirely new; learning like a child, jittering like a puppet.
(My review on RYM)
Entries 006 - 017 above
iceQuarium -Strawberry-
Irucaice [いるかアイス], 2021
Nothing groundbreaking, but not bad, either.
Some cute twinkly fluffy denpa bitpop here — I enjoyed "very * berry * planet (39 mix)," "Fluffy Blue Comet," "Lovely Kitchen" and "Twinkle Lights (39 mix)" enough that they'll probably make it onto my moe-denpa shuffle.
There's something almost nostalgic about "Orca (yomoha Remix)". It reminds me of a lot of the piano rockish Miku ballads I heard a lot when I was back in middle and high school — I have ryo's "Melt" in mind.
Rabbit in the black room
rabbit house, 2023
Artcore that makes great use of its generous amount of J-core stylings — further integrating frantic eclecticism and complex sound design into an already-dense and highly melodic form, pushing its rhythms firmly into hardcore territory. Some notes of colour bass I really enjoy, too.
Rabbit House is great here at creating epic and emotional soundscapes without sounding stale, and there's always something to be said for being able to splice harder, more metallic textures (and even the less harsh, spacier future tones) into more organic classical sounds effectively. The flowing variety of tones within each track create a sense of fantasy and narrative I really like in artcore.
Ubari Magic Postcard Maker
Kaizo Slumber, 2025
Just fine. Some tracks I definitely like — I'm a sucker for any kind of ambient that could be described as aquatic and/or "frutiger." The rest isn't bad at all, but outside of the soundtrack setting doesn't do much for me. (I have yet to try Ubari Magic Postcard Maker, the game this soundtracks, because I have limited recreational computer access right now.) Slumberspa is as yet undefeated as my favorite Kaizo Slumber ambient / new age album.
Both versions of "ASCIISTAMP Gallery" feel like music that would play in a Tomodachi Life shop. "Export Postcard" wouldn't feel out of place at all in the Wii system music, which is nice on its own but also within for me to hear in Kaizo Slumber's modern discography; the use of Wiiesque (and N64esque) sounds is part of what appeals to me in Ziad's earlier, vapory work as Acetantina.
Teenage Dreams
DJ Heartstring, 2023
Another warm, hypnotic euro-trance EP from DJ Heartstring. Not much to say, really — it's just good trance.
Made me think about how some strains of trance function similarly to ambient in that, as Brian Eno put it in the Ambient 1: Music for Airports liner notes, it "must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." Of course, trance is more focused on rhythm and structure than ambient, but the focus on texture and atmosphere is there, and so is the resulting absorption of the listener into the flow of the music. Had that with this EP — I was pretty busy at work and just lost myself in it for a while, my awareness drifting in and out, details and outline and details and contours, yet always entranced.
Best as an album listen.
MG Ultra
Machine Girl, 2024
Feels good to start the year with some new Machine Girl. Bangers as always, but smart, and brutal, too. "Grindhouse" simultaneously figures capitalism as a form of depraved, sexualized violence and articulates the assignment of desire / meaning to violence; the extraction of labor as rape, torture as entertainment — inevitable extension of commodification of the labor the flesh produces into the commodification of the flesh itself; consumption / creation / seeking of suffering as keeping / losing / finding feeling. "Schizodipshit," a piercing scream from inside the head of the web-radicalized mass shooter, screeching canary in the cabled coalmine, is bolder in its attempt to depict and decry and sticks the landing. Even when it's not brutal, MG Ultra captures many technocapitalist pressure points in day-to-day life concisely throughout.
Yet I most like the tracks that push forward into the future. The dips into bittersweet walls of shoegaze in "Motherfather" evoke a queer and abused grief, a homesickness for people who will never understand you that can't always be quelled by the truth it confronts: sometimes you must leave it behind. "Until I Die" is angry, but above all it is a threat, a promise, to keep fighting, no matter the pain presented throughout the rest of the work. With our ache, we carry on.
(My review on RYM)
January