It’s been a minute since my last post, but I think this might be the shortest time between posts since 2022! So that’s something!
How’s everyone doing these days?
Sorry to hear that, yeah, me too.
Anyways, this site is still broken. If you leave a comment I’ll be able to read it but it won’t show up on the site. Sorry about that. I’m hoping to get that fixed very soon. I found someone online who said they’re willing to help. In the meantime, if you really want to reach out to me, give me a shout on Blue Sky.
I did manage to resurrect my YouTube channel with semi-regular updates! You should check it out! I’ve done some videos about records I recently bought, did deep dives on Mario and Zelda soundtracks, and even did some angry YouTube bullshit whining about AI. (Guess which video was the most popular.)
Right now, I’m doing a series where I rank literally every movie I’ve ever seen. Of all the projects I’ve done on YouTube, it’s by far the one I’m most happy about. I really enjoy making the videos. They give me a chance to talk about a lot of movies that no one has ever heard of, which is one of my favorite things to do, and I feel that it’s a unique concept that not many people have attempted before. No one is watching the videos, but I’m going to keep doing them!
Shit, no one reads this blog either but that’s rarely fucking stopped me. Remember that I also have a podcast. Some people do actually seem to listen to that, so that’s nice.
Tonight, a complete album by a band you have, without a doubt in my mind, ever heard of. Gee, for some reason I can really identify with bands that are completely forgotten and no one care about. Go figure.
Dorf – Compact Dorf (Click here to download the album)
One of my favorite record stores in Tokyo is the Disk Union in Shinjuku. It is seven stories tall, and each floor has a different theme. In my 10+ years in this country, the first floor has changed layouts multiple times. It used to be the new release floor. Then it became an ill-fated cafe that I think I never once set foot in. That was a waste of floor space, let me tell you. A couple years ago, it was renovated again into an all anime and game music store.
Have you ever seen Hostel? You know that scene where the dipshit protagonist stumbles upon the snuff house and he bumps into the Japanese guy (Takeshi Miike)?
Yeah, it’s kind of like that for me. It’s a problem, is what I’m saying. They know me by name. I’m the Norm of that store.
Last week they had a sale. I bought a lot of CDs. I bought TWO soundtracks to TWO different Space Invader games that I didn’t even know existed. I bought the soundtrack to the Nintendo DS Araknoid game. I bought the soundtrack to the original Tekken (it has dub remixes). I bought the soundtrack to something called 1997 Nostalgia. I don’t even know what the fuck that is, but I liked the cover and it was ¥500 so I was like, “fuck it who cares.” Turns out it’s the soundtrack to some MSX game and it has a real dope mid-90s MIDI vibe.
I also bought this. Also because it was about ¥500. And I liked the minimalist vibes of the cover art. Really clean 90s Designers’ Republic shit. It looks like something the art team from Bungie would plagiarize, that’s how cool it is.
This is Compact Dorf by the band Dorf.
Bad band name. Bad album name. Really good music though!
The music is a bit hard to describe. Although maybe that’s just because I haven’t written about music in a few years now and I’m out of practice, who knows. It’s very much electronic music, that much I can say. There are no guitars here. It’s all synths, keyboards, drum machines, and samples. Some of the tracks have vocals, but nearly all of them are processed through vocoders and other electronic effects. I can’t even tell if they’re singing in Japanese or English.
Tracks like “Datum” and “The Link” have big Kraftwerk vibes, with bouncy beats and robot vocals, while songs like “Zeitgeist” give me YMO energy, with an emphasis on traditional Japanese-sounding melodies. What makes the album really stand out, however, is the heavy chiptune sound. I’m sure that most of this was composed and performed on synths both modular and electric, but the whole album feels like it was arranged using sound libraries from Super Nintendo games.
And that’s really something because this album came out in 1996, and according to the one page I can find on the band, they formed in 1990! I have no idea what their earlier stuff sounds like, but if it’s anything like this I feel safe in saying that these guys were light years ahead of their time. What’s the earliest chiptune artist you can think of? Bit Shifter? Anamanaguchi? YMCK? These guys predate all of them by at least a decade. They even precede Polysics, whose chiptune meets Devo sound didn’t start to make waves until the second half of the 90s.
I was so stoked to discover this! You know how hard it is to find genuinely obscure music these days? It feels like everything’s not only been discovered at this point, it’s all on Spotify with YouTube essays about it and vinyl re-issues from Light In the Attic getting pressed. And not only is this genuinely obscure, it’s really good! It’s one of my favorite albums that I found this year! I can’t believe this has just fallen through the cracks like this. It’s probably because the album was self-released. And with the band kaput, there’s no one around to re-publish it or get it online in any way.
I am surprised that there’s almost nothing about them online, however. All I can find is on that one page, and a sole live performance from 2005 uploaded to YouTube.
From what I can gather on that page, the group went through several lineup changes both before and after this album. On Compact Dorf, they were a trio; the members being Okuno Terushige, Komaba Mikiya, and Yamazaki Yasunori.
I did a bit of digging on those names. Yamazaki Yasunori is on Discogs. Apparently after he left Dorf he went on to form an electronic duo called Uni. This was in the early 2000s. It appears he hasn’t released much music since then. He has a Soundcloud but there’s nothing on it.
I also found Komaba Mikiya on Discogs. He’s released several albums online under the name Komaba. It sounds a lot like Dorf, albeit with a bit less of the video game influence and more of a general “electronica” sound. I dig what I’ve heard.
As for Okuno Terushige, I got nothing.
Again, going back to that sole page with information on the group, I see that they have a few other releases, but a lot of them are tape only. I have no idea how to even begin a search to track those down. There are stores in Japan that sell old cassette tapes, but they don’t carry stuff like this: they’re more down to charge you $50 for a Billy Ocean tape or some bullshit. I guess I’m going to have to start scouring Japanese auction websites. I just know I need more of this band in my life. I hope you give this a listen and feel the same way.