splattercell wrote: >re: the japanese music-marketplace, someone asked: > >>Isn't there anything a bit more "serious" out there? >well, of course there is. for starters, one might try: >ryuichi sakamoto. >yoshiro hanno. >toru takemitsu. >nobukazi takemura. >kk null (and others from the osaka 'noise' scene, a la the boredoms.....) >hamza el-din (egyptian by birth, lives in tokyo.) >dj krush. >.....just off the top of me head..... Add "Ruins" (or any other band with Yoshida Tatsuya) Otomo Yoshihide Haino Keiji Melt Bannana Hoppy Kamiyama Altered States Endo Michiro Fomoflo (I play in that one) Zeni Geba DemiSemiQuaver And a score of others, BUT Joeri asked about "well selling" and those people are all highly eclectic acts that have larger followings outside Japan than within and even in the places where they are most popular their fan basses are small groups of hard core fans. BTW the Japan noise movement (of which I was once considered a part) is no more an Osaka phenomenon than it is a Tokyo one. Like I said in my original post there are plenty of brilliant highly creative Japanese acts but they are totally ignored by the mainstream machine although most of them have members that actually eek out their livings in the japan studio world. Joari asked why so many people hate the Majors and I was simply explaining what it is I hate about them. He said there is a reason why the majors are major and I agree with that too. Here the reason is that they are totally free to manipulate the market and flood it with crap while letting the real thing starve. There is one interesting side effect though. Interesting artists here know they do not have a snowball's chance of getting a deal with the majors so they never feel even slightly tempted to compromise and the result of that is often totally full on abstract inaccessible insanity that is a wonder to behold.