SUGARSOUL feat. Kenji Furuya -- GARDEN

Hello, J-Canuck here! Fireminer is back with a new article on an R&B band that hasn't been on KKP before.

 

It is difficult for a single blog entry to comprehensively describe the impact of YouTube to overseas fans of Japanese music. Till this point, I still can’t wrap my head around the effort my older brother put into loading up his Gen 2 iPod with Japanese music at a time when you pretty much had to go fishing on P2P servers. But only a few years down the line and things got much easier with YouTube. Just go there and you can enjoy an entire world of Japanese music in full 240p glory.

     A good number of my peers were immediately attracted to Japanese hip-hop because of YouTube. They did not belong to the breakdance crew, who were into Crunk anyway. I suppose they were born a bit too late for the Missy Elliot era, so they went with M-Flo and Nujabes instead. In hindsight, their style of atmospheric reggae- and R&B-infused hip-hop truly was the forefather to the modern lo-fi beat music you find everywhere on YouTube nowadays.

     The one YouTube music video that overseas fans kept recommending to each other was “Garden” by Sugar Soul (シュガー・ソウル) and Kenji Furuya (降谷建志) of Dragon Ash fame. Little has to be said about Dragon Ash. If you were into Japanese hip-hop at the time, you knew Dragon Ash. Sugar Soul though we had little idea about. They were an R&B trio formed in 1996 by DJ HASEBE (real name: Hasebe Daisuke), vocalist aico (real name: Machida Aiko) and composer Kawabe (real name: Kawabe Kenhiro). Their single Garden was released in 1999 and was arguably their biggest hit to date.

     That orchestral backing was just delightful and hankered back to the 90s golden age of hip-hop, when you started to see a lot of crossovers but the music had not been subsumed by the lazy sampling of the bling era. The lyric was inspirational and talked about reaching to a promised land through the fire and turbulence of life. It’s the kind of music that puts spring in your steps.

     Sugar Soul would release another four singles and one album before calling it quit in 2001. After giving birth, vocalist aico resumed activity as the singer for the electronic dance unit KAM (カム) in 2010. Sugar Soul reunited in 2018 to commemorate their 20th anniversary and released the EP “UPLOAD”.