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.
Ishihara tells me he feels a similar ethos emanating from dariacore and hyperflip as outsider music and noise collages, but he doesn’t know exactly how to put it in words. The first comp he dropped, which took a year to put together, was farewell dariacore, you WONT be missed. After that came Hyperflip Overture, which he describes as the most influential tape in the Japanese scene, overloaded with beats so kinetic it’s like you’ve stuck your finger in an electrical socket. Lost Frog’s compilation tape from last fall, FLUXCODE, has some of the most thrilling mashup music I’ve heard in ages: Billboard hits mutilated by homicidal drums; hardstyle so hard you can’t help but laugh with awestruck disgust; a song that opens with a robotic voice saying they’ll pass on receiving backshots because they want to achieve their career goals.
As Lost Frog ramped up, the American side of the scene started to slow down. Jane Remover stopped releasing music as leroy, and dariacore wizards like carbine and dashie (who made an appearance in my last column) shifted away from the sound. A Discord server called “snare society” that was an online hub for the scene shut down. It’s hard to fault any of these musicians for ditching what some see as a “silly meme sound”—many of them are young and exploring the limits of what they’re able to make. steej says an air of anxiety hung over the scene as people argued about taxonomy and the outside perception of the music. While the electronic producer has started to pivot away from pure dariacore, they still admire the sound and think it has a widespread influence that not many people give it credit for. “I would never say ‘let it die out,’” steej said. “I think it’s really sick that it’s still alive somewhere.”
Amid this decline, Ishihara kept following what he calls dariacore’s “second wave,” with artists like reali, cluli, and reallerr. There are now loads of new producers, with increasingly peculiar and insular aesthetics, like pages based around “the dress” and computer screenshots. There’s a surge of Japanese dariacore musicians; the 47 participants in Lost Frog’s CAR CRASH AND SIREN compilation are all Japanese, and there’s a collective called JPDH, or Japanese Dariacore Hyperflip. Ishihara believes the sound took hold in Japan partly thanks to the country’s song remix and OtoMAD meme culture, and because scene pioneers sampled familiar anime and J-pop hits (the pixelated rush of Perfume, shimmering Vocaloid music like the Hatsune Miku cut “Tell Your World”). There are many frenetic highlights; the galactic assault of curren’s “Accelerate” and even more hectic “INTERNET_IRIS” feel borderline purifying, like power hoses soaking my brain.
It’s been sweet watching the sound expand overseas, the seeds of inspo traveling way further than the pioneers intended. There haven’t been many (or any) dariacore-specific shows in America to my knowledge, but now you’ve got Tokyo clubs packed out with teens thrashing to xaev, steej, and Grave Robbing cuts. CCS’ next show will be in Osaka, and Ishihara is throwing a Twitch show in June combining Japanese DJs with producers like elwood and marshall4. Hopefully, this is only the start of a scene-renaissance that brings the sound to new heights.
The wildest dariacore is not simply “meme remix” music stuck in retro-stasis. It goes beyond sampling to something like voodoo possession, turning Doja Cat into the singer of a wicked hardstyle-pop act, lacerating Charli xcx in a cyclone of blades, imagining what Big Time Rush would sound like if they teamed up with PC Music to make the most violent love song of all time. Every bar is a new style, a new pattern, a new vision that you could expand into another whole song. It’s the opposite of anhedonia—all-hedonia?—an inability to feel anything but pleasure.
It’s especially refreshing, in this moment of stifling megaplatforms and shallow copy-paste genres, to see a community of artists striving not to rule the algorithm but to impress and one-up each other. Lost Frog, with their live shows and pay-what-you-want Bandcamp ethos, is helping facilitate the style’s small-scale growth. It’s one of a network of netlabels like Dismiss Yourself that act more like digital foragers than commercial machines, scraping the deep crevices of the web for freaky genius with 50 plays.
After 33 years of running the label, Ishihara considers his role in dariacore-hyperflip one of his proudest achievements. “I am now 52 years old, so the rest of my life is getting shorter and shorter. I would be happy if I could discover as many unknown artists as possible as long as my body is healthy and let as many people as possible know about them,” he told me. “It is also my hope to preserve those releases on the internet for posterity. Think about it, what will people 100 years from now say when they listen to today’s dariacore? I get excited thinking about it!”
