Fukamachi

The kaleidoscopic psychedelia of 1970s Japan captured a fragile and fertile moment as the country sought its future in funk grooves, heavy reverb and lyrical hallucinations. The follow-up compilation to Time Capsule’s Nippon Acid Folk, Nippon Psychedelic Soul takes myriad pathways into the tripped-out undergrowth of 1970s Japan. Finding their feet at home and looking for inspiration abroad, the musicians featured here were engaged in the communal soul-searching that followed the breakdown of the 1960s protest movements. Some made it big, others drifted into oblivion. The music they left behind shimmers with intensity.

Tomoko, is your average female high-school student, with average family and average high-school life. One Saturday she and her two classmates, Goro and Fukamachi-kun, are tasked with cleaning up in a school lab after the classes, and when she's alone, she hears strange noises from the lab's storage room. When she walks in, there is a strange smell in the air, and she passes out. After that things aren't quite what they used to be - or, rather, on the contrary: she finds out that the following day keeps repeating itself, and she is caught in a time loop with a romantic flavour. As a bonus you get the vintage landscape of the town of Onomichi, where the film was shot, and which back in 1983 looked just like it might have looked a hundred years earlier.

Trailblazing instrumental synth pop experiments created to soundtrack Japan’s booming 1980s cartoon and comic industries. The brightly futuristic instrumentals on this collection reflect the mindset of composers and musicians who believed in a technological future where everything was possible. In the late 1980s Japan experienced a brief but heady period where societal changes combined with new-found wealth to open up a world of possibilities. A huge influx of cash - artificially created by slashed interest rates after an agreement with the US to weaken the dollar relative to the yen - resulted in the inflation of real estate and stock market at a rapid pace. While the economic bubble it created was unprecedented and impossible to sustain, for a while money was in plentiful supply.The musical genre City Pop reflected the aspirations of the country’s booming leisure class. Video games flourished with Nintendo's 1983 launch of their Family Computer (or FamiCom). Studio Ghibli was founded 1985 to later became one of the most famous and respected animation studios in the world, and Anime and Manga were established as major forms of entertainment for all generations of the Japanese public.