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.
Sugar Planetarium [シュガープラネタリウム]
Suzushiro [ すずしろ], 2017
Comments
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)
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)