2016 marked my second year at Anime Detour, an anime convention near Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the first one where I actually went to a few panels. Since anime series aren't normally my thing, I wanted to see some music-oriented panels to find some new music I could discover, and also what I could purchase in the process. While I was initially focused on finding Japanese music, I was also intrigued by the K-pop panels offered. I ended up missing the second panel, The History of K-Pop, but I did catch K-Popalypse, a sampler reel of the previous 365 days in K-pop hits, and found a bunch to enjoy, particularly the BigBang track Bang Bang Bang.
Those were only 30-second snippets, though. The two Japanese music panels, both of them on Saturday, featured the songs presented in full. For these two, I'll give overall impressions, along with linkable tracklists.
J-Indie: Music Outside Of The Anime Sphere
1:30 PM - Edina
The music here was all pretty recent, within the last five years or so, and most of it appealed to me pretty well. The presenters were starting to run out of time, though, so they weren't able to play all of the songs listed on the sheet above. There was also a technical problem with how the videos were ripped, so the presenters had to play the songs themselves from iTunes and repeatedly joked about the sync issues that resulted. Honestly, it was never really an issue, I personally would've enjoyed it with or without the visuals.
It's also incredibly unfortunate that a bunch of the videos here were blocked thanks to YouTube Red being a thing, so trying to link them here was a bit of a pain for me. The below playlist is based on the full sheet list, not the cut version presented.
The back of the sheet listed Facebook and Tumblr pages for the panel, although the Facebook one didn't seem to be working.
Tracklist:
6. Good Morning America - Catch & Release (video blocked in US)
7. Kavka Shishido - ラヴコリーダ (video blocked in US)
10. Shishamo - 僕に彼女ができたんだ (video blocked in US)
13. Sakanaction - ミュージック (video blocked in US)
14. Inshouha - 綺麗
Japanese Music Bento
10:30 PM - Plaza 3
It was either this panel or the Saturday rave, and I'm pretty glad I chose this, cuz it was the single best panel I'd been to the entire con. Literally everything that was played appealed to me in some way, a lot of it was stuff I'd either never heard of before or was only barely familiar with, and the presentation of the material was smoother and really, really fun.
I should mention that despite loving the shit out of this panel, I don't quite remember the exact sequence of music played. At the end of the panel, the guy presenting posted a link to a photo of the playlist, but I completely forgot to get it on my phone. This list is based on what I remember it being.
1. Boris - Pink
(brief summary of Yamantaka Eye's controversial first band Hanatarash, shown with this destruction video)
11. The Mad Capsule Markets - Tribe (video blocked in US)
Music Hauls
During the con, I picked up L'Arc-en-Ciel's albums Tierra and True for 20 bucks each, which is probably about how much each of them would've cost with individual shipping from Buyee. The same dealer also had Hikaru Utada's Singles Collection Vol. 2 for about 30 bucks, and since I have all of her studio albums, I figured I should hold out for a way cheaper price to get the songs I don't already have. I also saw Puffy's stateside An Illustrated History compilation there, but I wasn't sure if there was anything on there I didn't already have so I passed.
Afterwards, I found Babymetal's Metal Resistance at a Best Buy on the way back home for about nine bucks, which I still need to get to listening to.
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In summation, I'm very glad I was able to return to Anime Detour, and I'll definitely try to come back next year to see what else I can find. Having all of this new music to seek out and explore also made me feel extremely invigorated to be a music nerd.
