23ji no ongaku

Welcome to 23ji no ongaku! If you’ve arrived here and are wondering where unchained went, you might want to read “I Broke My Blog,” a revealing entry where I describe the exact stupidities that led me to delete a major chunk of my former blog and basically mess up whatever plans I had to gently retire my it before introducing a new one. (The tl;dr: I’m dumb. I made a new blog.) If this is your first time reading, welcome! You’re very fortunate to start this journey with me without knowing about all the crap I used to ramble on about until the cows came home.

23ji no ongaku is a blog about music. Mostly Japanese music, but occasionally Korean and English language music, too. As most of you probably already-sorta know, my name is Nicole and I’ve been writing about Japanese music for three and a half years, listening to it for ten. I used to go by “pengie,” but I chose to switch to my real name with this blog for a number of reasons that are entirely too boring to go into. If you still want to call me pengie, I’m cool with that. (I still call myself that in my head, occasionally.) If you’d rather switch to Nicole, that’s fine by me as well. The important thing is that I’m over here writing about music, and I’d love it if you could stick around and read a few things. Maybe you could even leave a comment!

So, why did I delete unchained and start 23ji in its place? Well, the answer has a lot of parts to it. But I guess I can say that I felt it was time. unchained was a very experimental and (especially as of late) unstable venture into the world of blogging. I never really seemed to get into a good routine with it, I started to resent some of the things I’d written, and I also quite honestly got tired of the blog name after about two years. (That was around the time that I started making side blogs with all sorts of cool names, as if they would make up for unchained’s crappy one. My favorite was “the sequel to the letter after the wound,” which combined song titles from LITE and Sakamoto Miu. Also, three people knew about that blog, so don’t feel left out…) 23ji gives me the opportunity to start fresh, get myself into a fairly good routine, write under my real name (because I am definitely not embarrassed about my writing anymore!), and routinely confuse people with the name of my blog.

The “right” way to pronounce the name of this blog, as far as I am aware, is “nisanji no ongaku.” It means “songs for the 23rd hour,” which (if you’re thinking in 24 hour time) is 11 PM. It’s the title of a Kanno Yoko album that predominately features Sakamoto Maaya, one of my all-time favorite singers. I really didn’t come up with the title right away–actually, I created a Twitter account called “23ji” (after also deleting my old one there) because I had nothing else to use, I remembered the album title, and… I’m currently 23 years old. (Lame, I know.) But the more I thought about it, the more it stuck in my head, and I honestly just shrugged and said “that’s a pretty good blog name” while installing WordPress yet again. So here we are, 23ji no ongaku.

I’m feeling good about this blog. Will it last? I don’t know. I don’t have any expectations, right now. But I’d like to get back to doing what I think I do best–writing about music and sharing it with others–so I won’t waste any more time on the introductions and background information. Welcome to the blog, and enjoy your stay!