Perfume’s Future Pop
Updating ways of J-Pop.
Text by Hitoshi Kurimoto
Perfume was officially announced to perform at Coachella 2019 coming April. Coachella Festival is the one of world’s largest festivals, located in desert area on the west coast. Every year, eyes and ears of music fans focus on its lineup, and the tickets are sold out immediately only to come with premium prices. When the festival started, most artists on the lineups and headliners were from rock, or Dance Music. But gradually the things have changed. Those from hip hop, or R&B have started taking its headliners, too. Eventually people says its lineup is the comprehensive map of current music trends. Coachella has welcomed Japanese musicians such as Cornelius, and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra so far. Last year, X Japan was featured and highly praised there. But I have to mention that the inclusion of Perfume of the event will raise a quite different perspective, which will bring the world wide breakthrough on the group. You know their music is built upon the current common idioms of popular music language, such as techno, electro pop, EDM. And that there are already many top artists of these genres coming from non English speaking areas. Now that BTS from Korea won No. 1 on the Billboard, there are many positive signs for Asian artists to run up the top of it. So we can conclude that the great chances are at hand of the group. Actually, foreign medias are paying much attention on Perfume’s appearance at Coachella. According to the reports on Billboard Japan Jan 29, “Paper”, “i-DQ”, “Forbes” ran articles about the group, showing their high expectations toward their upcoming performance. Future Pop , the seventh of their original album released last year is now available on tricolored vinyl, and still captures people’s mind by its world class dynamic sound production digging so deep into the future bass and leaving the J-Pop manners behind. Together with this sound, their stage act, designed by their innovative choreography and high tech visuals will give the audience awesome experience, undoubtedly. I believe that there will be dramatic change in post Coachella season around the group. You can claim that I am overreact, but I really mean that they are important output with big potential to update J-Pop History.
Translated by Kazuki Takami (intoxicate)
LIVE INFORMATION
The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival 2019
○Perfume’s performance days 4/14&21
www.coachella.com/
