WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA

The eccentric Wednesday Campanella are the creators of a dreamy brand of electronic pop that blends hip-hop, garage and house into something far from standard highly-staged, melodramatic J-pop. There are three members of the group - KOM_I, Kenmochi and Dir.F - but only KOM_I ever tends to take the stage.

The project began when Dir.F and Kenmochi met at Design Festa Tokyo. Together they cooked up the idea for Wednesday Campanella, completing the group when they met KOM_I, then still in high school, and asked her to join despite her lacking any musical experience. Originally it was planned that there would be a trio of performers, but although another vocalist appears on their first demo she remains uncredited and quickly disappeared, leaving KOM_I to front the project alone. The set-up they settled on features Kenmochi as the writer, KOM_I as the singer and performer and Dir.F as director and manager.

Wednesday Campanella started quietly in 2012, uploading a couple of tracks to YouTube and releasing their first CD, 'Suiyobi No Campanella Demo 1' at Design Festa Tokyo. In March 2013 KOM_I made her first live performance at a Tokyo nightclub and a couple of months later they released their first mini-album, 'Crawl to Sakaagari', exclusively through Village Vanguard Shimokitazawa.

The mini-albums 'Rashomon', 'Cinema Jack' and 'Watashi wo Onigashima ni Tsuretette' followed, along with EP 'Triathlon', before the full-length album 'Zipangu' shifted their sound further away from earlier hip-hop stylings to a blend of J-pop and EDM. In 2017 they attracted a wave of Western press coverage when they were the only Japanese act to play Tyler's Camp Flog Gnaw festival. Claims were bandied about that Wednesday Campanella were the only act to truly threaten to cross over from Japan in years, and later collaborations with French band Moodoid and Scottish group Chvrches seem to bear that out.