What follows is some kind of guide to psychedelic/noise music from Japan and New Zealand, basically focusing on material from the 1990s up to the early years of the new Millennium.
Why then and there? Well, when I wrote this stuff, NZ as my home country and Japan as my home both had a small but enthusiastic group of performers operating out of the sub-underground, creating challenging and exciting music sharing similar aesthetic qualities. While many of these artists had—and continue to hold—a respectable international audience, they were basically unknown and unappreciated in their own countries. And, in many respects, the sounds emanating from these fringes has helped define a lot of other concurrent "alternative" music.
Most of the content here was written in a short period starting from the late 1990s, a time when it was difficult to find information on a lot of what's included. Things have changed now, though, as a quick internet search will verify; and the easier accessibility of information basically led me to stop updating the information contained within around 2003. Changes in priorities/interests played a part here, too, as well as a general slackening off in activity by the artists involved in the NZ & Japanese scenes.
I've thought about tying to update things where appropriate, and have in a few cases, but to be honest, I don't have the time to do this for the entire site. I know some of the writing could be improved on, and information might be out of date, but hopefully there's enough here of interest or use to some of you to justify presenting it all in a basically unexpurgated form.