 XENON, the newly opened Shibuya style-clothing store, has recently released official information regarding their new original clothing brand named RiRiAN! This exclusive clothing brand will ONLY be sold at XENON. Well-known J-Rockers such as MiA and Tsuzuku from Mejibray modeled the new brand in a photo shoot recently and pictures can be seen throughout this article. The brand is said to release sometime in early July 2015 and will probably be available by the time you read this. The pictures shown are from the newest CURE Magazine issue #143, which is now available at XENON. They give you an idea of what the clothes will look like and also give you the chance to see them modeled well.
 I personally love the Black Mesh Tsuzuku is wearing with the all black outfit. I have to admit the new brand is looking very cool! The black and white styling motif gives the brand it’s own feel. RiRiAN looks like it will be delivering lots of good things in the future. I am sure XENON will be packed when the new clothes drop in July. If you wish to see more stop by XENON and pickup the newest issue of CURE Magazine #143.
Be sure to spread the word and give the store a visit in your spare time! The address to XENON is 319 E 2nd Street #119 Los Angeles, California 90012. Please be sure to follow all social media of XENON! All links will be below. Once again thank you guys for your time. This is Hikaru, until next time! XENON Official Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xenonshibuyastyle?fref=ts XENON Shibuya Official Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100007683409281&fref=t XENON Instagram: https://instagram.com/xenon.la/  (Disclaimer: While this article highlights newly released items in Japan due to the time difference between Japan and the US, the items that are discussed here are no longer available for purchase.) Pentagon released new merchandise recently. As all the fans gather and scramble to find the newly announced shirts form their company GOEMON Records, they can sit and admire the band member’s new photo shoot of these newly announced shirts. This merchandise will be on sale until June 25th 2015. The shirts themselves have a “sailor” theme to it. However, the second shirt (pictured on the bottom) is a regular collared shirt. The front has the band’s logo of an intricate eye and, as seen on the right side, it is followed by what it seems to resemble a bunny. The photo to the left shows the difference between the two.  Each member modeled the new shirts as well. The members had to pose for the fans and give everyone a taste of how they could wear the clothes! My favorite, along with many others, is Minpha, Pentagon’s bass player, rocking a skirt. I believe Minpha is probably the most liked member. Though that is hard to say since the sexy vocalist of the band, Chizuru’s, previous band Regalia has helped him gain popularity. Pentagon consists of :
Please be sure to give these guys a listen if you have yet to. Be sure to follow their twitter as well as their company GOEMON records! All links will be below! Thanks for your time!
-Hikaru Goemon Records Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/GOEMONRECORDS Pentagon Chizuru Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/pentagon_chizur Pentagon Minpha Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/Penagon_minpha Pentagon Taku Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pentagon_Taku Pentagon Atsuki Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/pentagon_atsuki Pentagon Yutori Official Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pentagon_yutori   Recently Swedish rock band, Kerbera, made a stop in the US and visited XENON in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. They held a Q&A session with many of their US fans. As the evening when on they answered questions, signed autographs and took pictures with those in attendance. In the course of this evening A-To-J’s alavic_222 was lucky enough to interview the band. Their first interview in the US! Here is the first half of that interview… Kerbera is a Swedish band consisting of vocalist Seike Clowniac (formerly of the band “Seremedy”), guitarist Zave Demonte, bassist Frederick Hale, and drummer Eric Foxx. While true to their own unique rock sound, they are also known amongst their fans for adopting elements of Visual Kei, both in style and music. Since their formation, they have released two singles, “Inglorious” and “Counterpoint” and the EP “She Saw Bridges Burn”. They have recently released the PV for their newest single “Deathbed”.  Okay, thank you for this opportunity! You just finished hosting a Q&A with some of your fans from the US. They seemed to have a lot of fun as I'm sure you did. Can you tell us a little something about your first impressions of the US fans? Freddie: Very good impression Seike: They were very happy and cute people. They were cute and they were not that different from the fans from Sweden actually. So I think that all the fans could really get along together and that's a great thing. Freddie: They look alike too. Eric: I was expecting them to be more shy actually, because a lot of our Swedish fans are pretty shy, but they didn't seem that intimidated by us. They were friendly and asked us a lot of questions. It felt good. Seike: It's really cool to see that they're from another part of the world, but still connected to the same things. It felt like home. I'm glad that this was such a positive experience! I'm sure the fans will love to hear your words! Now, can you tell us about some of your musical influences both personally as a group? Seike: I'm very influenced by classical music. I don't think you can really hear it in my sound, because I don't have a special sound when I sing or anything, but I would say classical music. Also when I write music I do something that's more like instrumental music, video game music and soundtracks. That's actually my biggest influence and what I listen to the most. Zave: My favorite band is Avenged Sevenfold. Muse is one of my favorite bands too. Then we have all the classic rock bands that have ever been. I'm also a huge fan of game and movie soundtracks. I take a lot of influence from them. I love all kinds of stuff, I take a little from this or that. Jazz, Classical, I take from everything. Eric: I'm mostly into classic heavy metal stuff. My favorite band of all time is KISS. Besides that, it's mostly the classic, heavy, thrash, eighties, seventies kind of stuff. Also some technical, progressive metal like Rush and Dream Theater. Those are my individual influences mainly as a drummer. Freddie: I like all kinds of music. I like film soundtracks, game soundtracks. Everything from pop, rock metal, hip hop, some jazz, everything. From Lana Del Rey to Bring Me The Horizon. Also a lot of classic acts, seventies, eighties, nineties, the grunge scene, nu-metal, everything. I even like Taylor Swift. I love tapping into other styles. Seike: I think you can actually hear that in our sound. It's very influenced by everything. We take a little bit from here and there and it's a great mix. I think it's actually a very original sound. We don't want to limit ourselves when it comes to sound so I think our fans can expect anything from our sound. You guys certainly have many varied influences! This leads me into the next question. From any genre, if you were able to do a collaboration with any artist, who would it be? Seike: Actually I would say Nick Pitera. He's from Youtube. His voice. He has the best voice I've ever heard. I love it. I would love to sing something with him, but he would make me feel very weird since he's my all-time favorite. Freddie: It would be pretty cool to do a collaboration with Lana Del Rey. Seike: Yeah, that would be so cool. Eric: There are so many. Seike: Yeah, we have actually talked to a lot of pop artists and asked: "Would you like to try to do something together?" No limits. If a band came to us and asked: "Would you like to try something?" we'd try it and if it's a good result, we'd release it. Eric: We're pretty open minded actually. Freddie: We've already done collaborations with a singer called Emerentia and also another singer called Wednesday. Beautiful voice, really beautiful voice. Seike: We actually have a girl who sings in a lot of our songs already. Eric: She's been in three songs now hasn't she? Freddie: Yes, she has. Seike: As I said we're all open to anything. Of course we'd like to collaborate with our favorite bands. Eric: Imagine if Ronnie James Dio was still around. We could have him do some vocal parts on some songs. Zave: If we had no limits, then I'd have to say Queen and Freddy Mercury. Seike: I am also very open-minded to do collaborations with my Japanese friends. I have a lot of Japanese friends especially in the visual scene from my old band Seremedy. We've had dialogs about making some sort of collaborations either in making songs or doing a tour or something like that.   You mention Japanese friends, much has been said about your friendship with ANTI FEMINISM's KENZI. Can you tell us a little about that? Seike: Kenzi is my best friend from Japan. I've known him since I was sixteen, I am twenty-four now - how long has that been? Eight years. Yeah, it's been eight years. He's my best friend from Japan and he's the one who introduced me to Cure. It's actually why I'm here now. Moving on a bit, do you think you could give us a little background into the period from when Seremedy broke up until the formation of Kerbera? Seike: Yes, of course. What happened was that the band was at a point where everyone wanted to do different things. I have a very strong mind and everyone can agree that I can be very pushy. I pushed the band in a direction that wasn't right with everyone and everyone agreed that it would be better if we split and everyone do their own stuff. Then I started a new band. Actually, first I was thinking that I'd stop with music totally and focus on my clothing brand. Then all the fans came to me and I got thousands and thousands and thousands of messages saying: "I can't live without your voice!" I decided that I just can't stop. That's when I made Kerbera and the guys joined. In the beginning it was supposed to be a new Seremedy, very visual, but it turned out that since I had so much respect for their individual personalities now we are a band that is multi-influenced. You can't force someone to be what they're not, it's not going to end well. We really believe in this project and think that we're going to reach very far. It can reach to visual fans and lots of other fans. Freddie: Pop fans, rock fans. Seike: Yeah, we've met a lot of people into the pop scene that actually said that our sound is great. Freddie: It's something fresh and new. We wouldn't want to limit ourselves to one genre. Seike: We aren't just one genre, but I also wouldn't want to say that we aren't Visual Kei either. Eric: Obviously we have style! Seike: And that's sort of the short version of what happened. It's interesting you mentioned many fans associating you with Visual Kei, this leads me to my next question. A lot of your fans consider your genre Visual Kei, what are your thoughts on this? Seike: What I've always said, for me, whenever fans say that they're inspired by me, is that Visual Kei has no limits. When Visual Kei was created in the eighties it was a style. Nothing is feminine, nothing is masculine. You just take what you have inside and put on the outside. In music and in style, you use make-up, you use your hair, you use everything you have. You take that and you create something from it. That's what I think the foundation of Visual Kei is for me. I also know that many of my Visual Kei friends from Japan agree with this. They don't want to limit themselves, they just want to do something. Sadly, I think the scene has been limited by the fans actually. I want to reach out to the fans actually and say: “Open up your mind and don't exclude people from the scene.” That's very, very important. That's why I want to say that Kerbera is a Visual Kei band, but we're not. Because when the fans say that people exclude us from being Visual Kei I want to ask: "Why can't we be? Of course we can be!" That's what Visual Kei is, it's expressing yourself. The scene has no limits. When you compare bands you can't really find any connecting elements or common denominators. You take a band like MUCC that are considered Visual Kei for some reason and then take An Cafe and you're like: "What the fuck?" Freddie: We are visual. We have a look we have the aesthetics. Seike: The "kei" is just the word for "style". We are a Visual Kei band, maybe not as Visual as some of the fans would say. Freddie: I mean the fans label us as a VKei band. I don't mind. Seike: We don't mind, the thing is we don't want to limit ourselves. Freddie: When you're a VKei band you're just a VKei band. We don't want to limit ourselves. We want to go global. Seike: So that’s the thing that makes us not Visual, we don’t want to limit ourselves to any one thing. I would go as far to say that we're a rock band with many influences with no labels. We are not, not a Visual Kei band. Zave: And if you limit the nuances, you're probably going to kill the scene. Seike: Exactly, that's what I believe. I'm a big supporter of this scene. I made "Visual United" and pushed to make an impact to make people realize that there are bands from all over the world that are into this scene. To make it survive both in Japan and overseas. I think it's a wonderful scene and all the people surrounding it. I want to reach out to the fans and say: "Support all the bands in the scene." This is a very contested issue within the Visual Kei scene unfortunately. I agree with you though and hope that the fandom takes your words to heart. Can you tell us a little about Kerbera's songwriting process? Seike: It's very hard to say because we've tried out a lot of different ways. The songs are mainly written by Freddie, he's the bassist and also does vocals. It's hard to say. Freddie: A few of songs Zave and I wrote together. Like the first riff came up at his place and the whole song was finished somewhere else. Seike: We've tried lots of ways of writing songs actually. Zave: Some of the songs we've done together [with Freddie] some songs he's done by himself. Seike: And I can come up with a little thing and he can pick it up like that. I'm not very good with instruments, I can just piano that I taught myself, but I can come up with a melody and he can put it all together. Freddie: Normally I write the instrumentals, then me and Zave kind of tweak it and do some minor changes. Then either Seike or the two of us write the lyrics. Seike: It depends. A lot of the time he comes to me with the lyrics and asks: "What do you think about this?" I ask about the meaning and he explains it. If I like it, we don't change it. There are some songs that we have that are just fucking perfect. Otherwise, like on our new single "Deathbed", we write the lyrics together. Actually, we all came up with the melody. We wrote the song first then put on the melody. Freddie: It varies. There's no one way. Seike: That affects the sound as well. Very much. We have so many ways of doing it. Like I wake up in the middle of the night and I just record something I hear in my head to the phone. So yeah, inspiration comes from everywhere. Eric: The thing about the latest single "Deathbed" that makes me attached to it is that not only is it a really good song, but we all were involved in the process that led to the final version of the song. We all worked on the vocal melodies, we all worked on the vocal harmonies in the chorus and stuff like that. It's the first song actually where all of us singing, all of us are doing one vocal harmony each. We want to keep working that way too. Do like The Beatles and KISS did. Seike: Exactly, everyone has a really good quality in this group and we want to expose it to the world. Freddie: It's really cool because all four of us can sing. Why not take advantage of it. Seike: Sorry we talk so much! Don't worry about it! The fans will love this!
Stay tuned for the second half of this interview and be sure to check out the links below for more information on the band and some of their PVs! Kerbera Are: ◆ Seike Clowniac (Vocals) ◆ Zave Demonte (Guitar) ◆ Frederick Hale (Bass) ◆ Eric Foxx (Drums) Official Site: http://kerbera.com/ Official Facebook Page (Kerbera): https://www.facebook.com/KerberaOfficial Official Facebook Page (Seike): https://www.facebook.com/madmanSEIKE 
Last year XENON brought the LA VK to Little Tokyo, Los Angeles during the Fourth of July weekend and changed the local Visual Kei scene forever! On July 5th, XENON will pull out all the stops for it's one year anniversary and bring the newly-named "UNITED MUSIC FEST" (Styled: "VNITED MUSIC FEST") to Amplyfi in Hollywood! 
Not content to simply bring another showcasing of Japanese Visual Kei bands to the US, XENON is going a step further to try something unique. The UNITED MUSIC FEST serves to not only bring Japanese bands to the States, but also to allow those bands to connect with local indies bands from the US. In other words this show will have a more collaborative feel than the LA VK Fest or other similar events. To this end, XENON has amassed a line-up of acts sure to provide something for everyone! On the Japanese side, the line-up features Japanese punk/hardcore legends "ANTI FEMINISM" and Kon & Nao (From "CELL" and "La'Mule") feat. Tomo (From "The Rhedoric"). More on these bands! 
That's right! ANTI FEMINISM will be returning to LA once again! Front-man, KENZI has rocked stages in the US before at the World Famous Whisky-A-Go-Go and last year's VK Fest and he is no stranger to putting on a powerful performance! The group's show at the UNITED MUSIC FEST is doubly special as it marks the band's, and KENZI's, 30th Anniversary! The undisputed Kings of Japanese Indies Rock will assuredly bring everyone a blistering set complete with KENZI's over-the-top stage antics! Be sure to get close to the stage and be prepared for headbanging! 
Kon & Nao are known to fans everywhere as the vocalist and guitarist (respectively) of the bands CELL and La'Mule. Fans of CELL in the US might recall that they were music guests at Anime Expo 2013 and vocalist Kon was a performer at last year's VK Fest. This year, Kon is joined by not only his longtime band-mate, Nao, but also by Tomo guitarist from the band The Rhedoric! This awesome line-up is further bolstered by the addition of Misai (From bands such as: "Black Crystal", "Allison Chains" and "Dollface") on drums! Misai is the winner of the CELL YouTube cover contest hosted by the show's promoters a few months ago. Be prepared for songs from throughout their storied careers!
The US side of things will feature Los Angeles Visual Kei/Lolita-inspired hard-rock band, "Lolita Dark" and San Fransisco rockers, "Phoenix Ash"! Both bands have large followings that belie their status as independent artists. Make no mistake, these bands are on the same footing as their stage-mates from Japan! Be sure to come early and catch both band's rocking sets! 
Not one to simply provide attendees with awesome music, XENON will also deliver a fashion show featuring clothing from popular gal brand, GHOSTS OF HARLEM. One of the hottest brands in Japan today, GHOSTS OF HARLEM has been featured at many fashions shows and events over the years including last year's Anime Expo. This fashion show will also feature DJ Meirlin. Much like the addition of fashion to the LA VK Fest, XENON is once again intertwining elements of Japanese culture, in this case music and street fashion, to form a more complete package for eager US fans! With the event built upon the concept "No Boundaries, Unite by Music" this show is bound to unite fans of Japanese music and musicians from around the world! Music is the true universal language and the UNITED MUSIC FEST has what it takes to take these shows to the next level! The show will take place at Amplyfi Hollwood (5617 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038 Right next door to Paramount Studios on Melrose Ave.in the heart of Hollywood. The best-kept-secret for live music. Green Doors behind 5617 1/2 Melrose Ave.) at 7:00 PM (Doors at 6:45) and will be an all ages event. Tickets are on sale now and tickets for the special VIP event to take place the day before the concert are almost sold out! Follow the links below for tickets and information and be sure to check out the videos for examples of the awesome music these bands have to offer!
Official Site: http://www.xenon-la.com/vmf2015 Ticket Links: http://xenon-la.com/vmf2015/tickets.html Official Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1538603579762380/ 
 XENON is pulling out all the stops for their upcoming live stream event! They will be hosting their next Q&A with one of the hottest current bands in visual kei today! These live stream events have been a general monthly occurrence and past events have featured bands like CELL, DIAURA, DaizyStripper, Arlequin and Royz amongst many others. This upcoming event will take place on June 27th and will feature the group, Mejibray, who will be broadcasting live from Japan into the store which will be packed full of their American fans. These events are unique in that they not only offer the Western fans to meet and interact with their favorite artists, but also allow the band themselves to interact with the fans too by way of their own Q&A. An interesting twist on the standard formula if there ever was one. This is a very special opportunity, fans in the US should clear their calendars and prepare those burning questions! A-To-J will also be on site to film messages for the band and to cover the event itself!  Mejibray formed in 2011 and was originally conceived as a solo project for vocalist Tsuzuku. That same year they debuted as Mejibray and released their first single "KILLING ME" on June 19th and their first mini album "Silvers.exe" on December 7th. The following year they embarked on the first One-Man Tour which culminated with a show at TSUTAYA O-EAST (Shibuya O-EAST). 2014 saw their first show outside of Japan at the Seiya Kyousou Sai -Halloween Party- at Shanghai Mercedes Benz Arena -The Mixing Room- on November 1st. They have recently released their 12th and 13th singles, titled "Nepenthes" and "EIKI" respectively, and will release their newest mini album, "VENOM.APP" on August 5th. On September 5th 2015, the band is planned to hold their first outdoor one man show at Hibiya Koukaido. The PVs for "Nepenthes" and "EIKI" can be viewed below!  XENON is the official Cure Magazine shop, located in The Little Tokyo Mall in Los Angeles (319 E. 2nd St #119 Los Angeles, CA 90012). It has been open since August 1st, 2014 and has hosted several events and fairs in that relatively short time. The store carries various apparel brands including Jury Black and Ghosts of Harlem, as well as, CD’s, DVD’s, and official tour merchandise of various idols and visual kei bands straight from Japan. This event, like their past live stream events, is completely free. No cover will be charged. It will run between 8:00-9:30 PM on June 27, 2014. and will be preceded a fashion snap shot session from 7:00-8:00 PM and a special mix set from DJ Meirlin from 12:30-2:30. SNS and event page links below. Mejibray Are: ● Vocal: Tsuzuku ● Guitar: MiA ● Bass: Koichi ● Drums: Meto Official Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/837920569635014/ XENON Official Site: http://www.xenon-la.com Mejibray Official Site: http://mejibray.com/ |
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