The best way to escape rehashing the same ideas that colored your debut album may be to physically escape that environment in which it was made. Such is the case with French trio Tapeworms, who established themselves in 2020 via Funtastic. It was a record that echoed the post-chanson electronic pop of Francophone groups like Stereolab, bolstered by a more contemporary sound landing somewhere between shoegaze and the whirring of infinite power generators working to the brink of immolation in order to meet our growing AI fantasy needs.
Yet their follow-up record Grand Voyage is quite explicitly what its title promises—it’s a physical remove from the band’s roots, as it chronicles their time in Tokyo, while the record’s sounds capture the overstimulated feel of such a city as it additionally applies a new set of influences culled from their time abroad. Ironically, it’s the city’s quieter corners that seemed to inspire the trio most: unassuming record stores, hard-to-spot bars, and cozy bathhouses. Instead, these locations offered a more thorough cultural immersion that found its way into the project’s DNA than any sort of POI tourist trap.
Ahead of the record’s release this Friday via Music Website and Japan’s P-Vine, take a trip through the streets of Shibuya, Setagaya, and beyond with Tapeworms.
A cafe and fruit sando in Daitabashi
There’s a wonderful melancholic feeling that gets to you when you walk down the street to Daitabashi, noticing the sight of Shinjuku’s building skyline before entering the neighborhood. It’s a super low-key place that counts many post-WWII tin-roofed shacks and narrow, silent shopping streets, displaying some faded Okinawa vivid colors—as Daitabashi has its own little Okinawa Town, imagined as a themed one to revitalize the area in 2005. It did get its years of glory, but it didn’t last long before falling into oblivion again, which adds to the nostalgia. We often set meetings in Three Kon Cafe, a super cheap and popular place, as we sit and wait for our nice coffee and fruit sando (which is the home specialty) while listening to some classical music.
ヨムキクノム (Yomu-Kiku-Nomu), Shibuya
This is the record shop where our very first friends in Tokyo work—and we owe them a lot, as they introduced Tapeworms to most of the people that helped us develop the band in Japan! Not far from Harajuku’s Takeshita shopping street, it’s always a nice place to stop when roaming around Harajuku/Shibuya. It’s for sure a shop for music lovers, with racks full of shoegaze and Japanese indie music CDs, vinyl, and cassette tapes, as well as zines and books. Tsushima san and Reiya always welcome us warmly, and we love to spend time there sharing thoughts about music and our experiences in Japan.
Bed, Harajuku
This is our favorite clothing shop in Harajuku! It exudes an amazing atmosphere that makes you want to listen to Deee-Lite and have a super good day. It offers a very well-selected collection of vintage, funky, pop clothes, and every piece seems so unique that it’s a wonderful place to window shop and imagine how cool the ’70s to ’90s vibes of the streets of Harajuku must have been.
Daikoku-yu, Yoyogi-Uehara
Having a bath in a sentō is always a good idea after a long walking day exploring Tokyo. This bathhouse is one of our favorites in the city, a hidden gem located in a corner of the streets of Yoyogi-Uehara. To access the entrance, you walk through a tin-roofed alley bordered with long-standing washing machines, some plastic baskets on benches, and many aged posters and autographed photos of Japanese celebrities that we don’t know about. The bath house itself is full of vintage and colorful furniture that makes you wanna stay long after your bath, cooling yourself before heading home, watching reaction shows on TV, drinking iced milk coffee on the sofa. Big Tapeworms bonus: you can hear some old J-pop while bathing and contemplate a wall fresco with a plane on it!
Forestlimit, Hatagaya
Tokyo has so many good live venues, it’s hard to choose only one—but if you wanna discover the deep, underground, local indie and experimental music, Forestlimit is the place to go! You may not know any of the scheduled acts, but you’ll for sure end up with some new favorite bands and Shazaming a lot of the DJs’ selections. We love to go to the now-iconic Wednesday’s K/A/T/O Massacre events to discover new music, but we’ve also had the chance to see some of our favorite artists there, like Takako Minekawa, Kate NV, and Tentenko. The venue itself is super cool and well-arranged, and the audience is always great.
Bar Juice, Shimokitazawa
Japan is full of amazing bars nestled in some random buildings’ upper floor that you can only spot from the street, thanks to the sign’s name on the wall. It’s never easy to let yourself climb the stairs and push the door of some places when you can’t feel the vibe from outside, but it may often lead to amazing encounters. Bar Juice is one of those. We love the atmosphere of this small bar, which is full of retro gaming references, ’80s to 2000s music posters, old movie figurines, and LED lights. The owner is super nice and has an amazing collection of CDs and music video files archived behind the bar in some CD folders and is always super happy to dig into it for you while serving great cocktails! He also has some nice DJ hardware, so he can make transitions when he feels like it. We had so much fun we forgot to take pictures of the inside!
