Milayou

I wish more songs had 10 seconds of church bells/footsteps/creaking door SFX thrown in the middle

I'm not too familiar with their stuff but Merry Go Round always seemed like a seminal "dark" 90's band.
 
There's also Orgel who fall right in line with Madeth Gray'll, and Kc+loid which you might like as well. I always feel like the gist of this stuff was released in 2000/2001 rather than the 90's proper by the way so you might have some chance digging just sliiightly further down the line (basically right before the genre went full nu metal/UCP style)

Dir en Grey - Sea of Retards
Girugamesh - The Foolish Mindcore
La:Sadie's - Rebirth

Hi. I’m one of the really old fans. I visited Tokyo in 1995 and came back to the US (NYC) with a pile of Luna Sea CDs and VHS tapes. At that time there was nothing about Luna Sea or visual kei on the English-language internet. Actual nothing. Well, the internet barely existed, it was just transitioning to websites from bulletin boards. I made some mix cassettes and handed them out to my friends.
 
Around ’96 or maybe ’97 I checked the internet again, and now we have something: California sisters Freda and Joannie’s website Rockin’ Heaven, and the X Japan ML on cohprog. It was tiny at first, like maybe 100 people. This was the entire Western VK fandom. We had all discovered Japanese music either on a trip to Japan, or through a Japanese friend.  A few of us were so noisy about talking about other bands who were not X that the Jrock ML was formed, so we took our OT over there and it exploded. There was no file sharing or international online stores at that time. I created a page to bring something like tape-sharing classifieds online, a manually updated list of people who had stuff to trade and what they were looking for. We copied cassettes and sent them by postal mail. It’s laughably low-tech compared to nowadays, but suddenly we were all listening to multiple bands instead of just our one gateway band. The Jrock ML membership and traffic was exploding week by week. There was one loud and cynical French guy who was really into super-obscure bands and claimed that he went to Japan and was friends with bands, but nobody knew whether to believe him or not. Word of mouth was definitely a thing — I gave my little sister a few mix tapes when she went to college and she came back for break cursing me out for those tapes, because all her friends had fallen in love with them and now she had to listen to VK all the time.
 
I think it was around ’98 that we started to see some improvements in bandwidth and webpages that let us take it to the next level. There was a guy in Singapore (Paul? maybe?) where they had better wiring, who first started putting up a few tiny RA and RV files on a site, and he had one of the early message boards too. By this time I was out of school and my circle of friends and I were working in the early internet, which gave me access to equipment, software, and bandwidth that almost nobody had at that time. My friends were installing the actual wiring and servers to build the NYC internet, and uh… while they were at it, they stashed an old computer somewhere to be our own FTP server. We put up my files (I had a ton of stuff because I’d been running the tape-exchange listing, and also I bought stuff from the Japanese stores in NYC) and allowed other people to upload their own. I added a message board which was originally supposed to be for requests or whatever but it took on a life of its own as a discussion place.
 
Maybe ’99 or 2000, CD Japan opened. The fandom was growing exponentially and everyone was trying to explore new bands, and even tiny indie bands were getting fan bases. Lots of people were putting up file sharing sites, using multiple GeoCities accounts to create these huge octopus sites. We started to have meetups IRL. Go (JrockNYC) and his friends had a cover band and put together some meetups around NYC. Cameron was in Tokyo and writing on Glam Japan, and some of us were traveling to Japan too. A few people went to that huge concert that Luna Sea did, Dir en gray had fans going, me and a bunch went to Lareine’s last tour in August 2000. (I met Cameron there for the first time)
 
By maybe 2002-ish most of the file sharing was happening on the P2P networks, and Livejournal was becoming popular. I moved to Tokyo in early 2002. Go was living in Tokyo too and documenting the scene on JrockNYC. It would be nice to read it again but I don’t think his old stuff is on line any more. This is getting to the time period where there are lots of people who were around to remember, so I’ll leave it.

Are you referring to Xodiack by any change, or to something even older? They started out in association with HearJapan that was going to be the place for all your jrock visual kei jpop and probably kpop in two years needs and then obviously people just pirated it and HearJapan threw a fit. Google tells me this was 2010 so I'm not sure if you can still get to the polemic that it caused here because it might've been gone with Tainted World. Anyway, I still remember it vividly and I was surprised any of those dudes managed to have a career afterwards ( Eros/Ice )

Wow, now that's a feel. I played out my home made copy of Aliene Ma'riage's Les Soirée in high school and it was a shock to hear some of these songs again at a quality above 96 kbps when I revisited the album almost 10 years later.
 
By the way, you mention you're french, are you familiar with Tanja? She used to have her own website with live reports going as far back as 1998. That place was a goldmine for me back in the day and it still remains an exclusive source of info outside of Japan for some of the more obscure bands she covered.
 
EDIT: found it again, here's a link for anyone interested https://web.archive.org/web/20120427161556/http://lasteve.free.fr/blog/autres/listeconcerts01.htm

Does anybody remember this band that was put together in Japan to be marketed in the west? They folded immediately after failing to garner interest and instead of listening to the fans telling them "this is not actually what we meant when we said you should bring VK overseas" the promoters blamed piracy culture for the death of their little experiment.
 
The whole period was a hilarious trainwreck on many fronts but that tiny bit of visibility still felt like such a ray of sunshine, little things like the PV for Saku getting voted all the way up to #1 on some european MTV chart really testify to how large and optimistic the fanbase was around then.

Wow, now that's a feel. I played out my home made copy of Aliene Ma'riage's Les Soirée in high school and it was a shock to hear some of these songs again at a quality above 96 kbps when I revisited the album almost 10 years later.
 
By the way, you mention you're french, are you familiar with Tanja? She used to have her own website with live reports going as far back as 1998. That place was a goldmine for me back in the day and it still remains an exclusive source of info outside of Japan for some of the more obscure bands she covered.
 
EDIT: found it again, here's a link for anyone interested https://web.archive.org/web/20120427161556/http://lasteve.free.fr/blog/autres/listeconcerts01.htm

Does anybody remember this band that was put together in Japan to be marketed in the west? They folded immediately after failing to garner interest and instead of listening to the fans telling them "this is not actually what we meant when we said you should bring VK overseas" the promoters blamed piracy culture for the death of their little experiment.
 
The whole period was a hilarious trainwreck on many fronts but that tiny bit of visibility still felt like such a ray of sunshine, little things like the PV for Saku getting voted all the way up to #1 on some european MTV chart really testify to how large and optimistic the fanbase was around then.

Does anybody remember this band that was put together in Japan to be marketed in the west? They folded immediately after failing to garner interest and instead of listening to the fans telling them "this is not actually what we meant when we said you should bring VK overseas" the promoters blamed piracy culture for the death of their little experiment.
 
The whole period was a hilarious trainwreck on many fronts but that tiny bit of visibility still felt like such a ray of sunshine, little things like the PV for Saku getting voted all the way up to #1 on some european MTV chart really testify to how large and optimistic the fanbase was around then.

Wow, now that's a feel. I played out my home made copy of Aliene Ma'riage's Les Soirée in high school and it was a shock to hear some of these songs again at a quality above 96 kbps when I revisited the album almost 10 years later.
 
By the way, you mention you're french, are you familiar with Tanja? She used to have her own website with live reports going as far back as 1998. That place was a goldmine for me back in the day and it still remains an exclusive source of info outside of Japan for some of the more obscure bands she covered.
 
EDIT: found it again, here's a link for anyone interested https://web.archive.org/web/20120427161556/http://lasteve.free.fr/blog/autres/listeconcerts01.htm

Tanuki is a pathetic place but entertaining. 
Ah yes, they seems to have something against foreign vkei fans. Maybe because we are generally taller and prettier? 

Believe me, I could kill someone to get my hands on some of those old fics again. What a way to get introduced to La:Sadies

I've been wanting to write some of this stuff out forever because I'm a huge digital packrat and I like to archive these types of things... I don't think any of this has been written out anywhere before, but I'm not sure how much people actually care about the fan culture part of VK here, especially the Japanese fan culture, and especially the online Japanese fan culture. But, just in case any of you are also level 50 Turbo Nerds I thought I should post it here. I hope this is a sensible place to put it??

this piece is WAY too long for how lame the subject is and i'm so sorry
tl;dr: tanuki is old as fuck and there used to be another tanuki and forums are dead, long live tanuki

edit: fixed a number i screwed up
 
 

That Mirage setlist is disappointing as hell. No Nadir? No Moon Light Dance??!!

I spent a month and a half hunting down the PV before youtube was a thing. Good memories....

What do people base themselves on when they call a VK band influential? Gut feeling? Observation? Or something sourced from actual members of the visual kei scene back in the day? You can draw parallels between La'mule and early 2000's bands all you want but how much of it is actually rooted in VK history?

What do people base themselves on when they call a VK band influential? Gut feeling? Observation? Or something sourced from actual members of the visual kei scene back in the day? You can draw parallels between La'mule and early 2000's bands all you want but how much of it is actually rooted in VK history?

What do people base themselves on when they call a VK band influential? Gut feeling? Observation? Or something sourced from actual members of the visual kei scene back in the day? You can draw parallels between La'mule and early 2000's bands all you want but how much of it is actually rooted in VK history?

Under... and Miss Moonlight. Chuuzetsu could be up there if a higher quality version existed.