In a video from a recent show at WOMB in Shibuya, Tokyo, a mass of giddy concertgoers reach their hands into the sky. The music rises calmly, until a machine groans and a siren shrieks. The bass explodes, sending shockwaves over the floor. Another post shows a crowd convulsing to Jane Remover’s frenetic “dancing with your eyes closed,” which shatters into an even more energized mashup by their alter ego leroy. Across the many clips captured at the event, it’s difficult to tell who’s playing or even what genre is the focus. It’s a vortex of ice-cold snares, diabolical BPMs, samples, vocal chops, Jersey club bed squeaks—a carnage of zoinked electricity.
This was the third installment of Car Crash & Siren, an event series launched by Lost Frog Productions, Japan’s oldest netlabel. The party, which took place on March 30 and brought in over 700 attendees, was Lost Frog’s biggest to date. Its theme was dariacore, also known as hyperflip, the ballistic mashup craze pioneered by a teenaged Jane Remover in the early 2020s. While Jane once disavowed the microgenre, it took on a life of its own online. It’s mostly been an underground phenomenon outside of a few moments in the spotlight, like when iShowSpeed hopped on a leroy beat and Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA took inspiration for “Fentanyl Tester.” Now the style is having a cult moment in Japan, mainly thanks to Lost Frog, which has published a spree of albums and compilations in the last two years with thousands of downloads. The name of their compilations and event series—Car Crash and Siren—was quite literally inspired by the blistering car crash and siren samples that often get used in dariacore tunes.
Lost Frog celebrated its 33rd anniversary last month with a compilation, Complex Numbers, centered around dariacore-hyperflip artists. It was slightly baffling to me that the man trying to keep this excruciatingly intense, brain-warping sound alive is 52. But taste has no age limit. Label founder Haruo Ishihara discovered dariacore from the breakcore producer breakchild and immediately became obsessed. “There is technical awesomeness, but I think the most important thing is passion,” he tells me over text. “It is filled with everything they like and feel nostalgic about. It’s music that is like life flashing before one’s eyes!”
The most electrifying dariacore feels like a computer vomiting up bile after getting E. coli: a dizzying gush of rewired samples and bass detonations and fried shivers. It’s adrenaline music for people who barely feel awake after four cortados, rave for a generation of YouTube Poop addicts. But the best songs are also highly elaborate, with a knack for nerdy beatcraft and trickster sound design that’s missing from the vast bulk of both popular EDM and shitposty mashup music. The visual aesthetic is key: Ever since leroy’s titular project dariacore, whose artwork was ripped from the ‘90s TV show Daria, DJs in the scene have based their accounts around specific cultural ephemera—Arthur, The Amazing World of Gumball, Blue’s Clues. Every song is a new “episode” in a “season” (album), with eccentric titles like “the elon musk soundcloud acquisition.” steej, a 20-year-old from the Chicago area, calls her version of the genre “giratinightcore,” a play on the Pokémon Giratina and hyperfast nightcore music. They told me they were hooked by dariacore’s impulsive, lightning-in-a-bottle energy, and the way the weirdly syncopated rhythms hold all the pieces together in a disorienting harmony.
Ishihara says the emotional intensity and body-shaking spirit of the music reminds him of what it felt like listening to drum’n’bass and gabber for the first time in the 1990s. Back then, he was going to clubs like the now-defunct Milk, in Ebisu, and playing in the band Surfers of Romantica, which mixed ear-stinging noise blasts with all sorts of cosmic and insect-tinny textural experiments. He devised Lost Frog as a way to release his own albums and friends’ music, initially distributing through cassettes and CDs. Once he got on the internet in 2000, he started hunting down international artists he admired, like Luke McGowan of the cultishly beloved Five Starcle Men. Lost Frog put out a compilation tape with the duo, Gomba Reject Ward Japan, in 2007. The music is bizarre—full of freakshow instruments and chewed-up gurgles, with lore about the band being involved in “alien drug torture” and “deadly cartoon culture governments.” Ishihara’s still in occasional contact with McGowan, who now teaches psychology at CSU Fullerton.
