One of the things that clinched my decision to go ahead and buy a MiniDisc player was the availability of large lots of "mystery music" from Japan. Something about the prospect of floating through an unfamiliar musical landscape carefully curated by folks for their own consumption appealed to me. As I listen to these discs, I'll take photos and make notes so that this page can function as a sort of unofficial additional inventory category until such time as I may decide to convert my notes into a TSV file. (I'll attempt to use my descriptions of the discs and photos rather than marking the discs, if possible, but I'm still going to assign IDs to each.)
I'll update this page as I go.
MD35: A translucent blue Prime Media 74 minute disc. Mostly J-pop, some J-rock and hip-hop. I think I just don't like SMAP much. Track 12 was built around some of the Super Mario Bros NES music. One of the tracks before that sounded heavily influenced by Radiohead's Creep.
MD34: A bright green AXIA MDJ'z 74 minute disc. A J-pop and (possibly?) J-rock mix, mostly. I disliked most of it, for whatever reason.
MD33: A dark blue Sony 74 minute disc. Labeled on its face, edge, and sleeve. Classical guitar and orchestral music.
MD32: A teal Sony 74 minute disc. Labeled on its face, edge, and sleeve. Classical orchestral music.
MD31: A dark blue Sony 74 minute disc. Labeled on its face, edge, and sleeve. Classical piano music.
MD30: A transparent Sony 80 minute disc. Labeled on its face, includes the phrase "Jazz 10." It's jazz, as promised.
MD29: A dark blue Sony 74 minute disc, same as MD27. Also labeled on the face (with a red "16" this time), edge, and sleeve. Old French music, largely big band and lounge. Much of it sounds like it was recorded from vinyl, but there are a couple more modern sounding tracks on there. Could be fun to sample. Opens with a classical guitar track.
MD28: A transparent, light turquoise TDK MusicJack 74 minute disc. Labeled on the face, on the edge, and on the sleeve. Classical piano music.
MD27: A dark blue Sony 74 minute disc. Labeled on the face, on the edge, and on the sleeve. Disc face label has a red circled 3 on it. Classical orchestral music.
MD26: A black Sony Color Collection 74 minute disc. Deep-fried rock. First track's title says "GUITAR KIDS." I can't tell what the source was, but it's clipping HARD. Some audience noise suggests this is a live concert, possibly from a personal MiniDisc recorder. The sound quality is atrocious. I didn't listen to the whole thing. But at least it's something unique! I could see some bits from this being slowed down and used in a vaporwave album.
MD25: A blue Sony Color Collection 74 minute disc. Easy listening. Every song is andante, and the instrumentation is almost exactly the same from song to song: strings, piano, bass, female vocalist, minimal drums, light acoustic or clean electric guitar (barely audible in the background). Track nine does have an distorted guitar riff as an intro and for color in the chorus, but then then it's back to the standard, plus a saxophone solo.
MD24: A red Sony Color Collection 74 minute disc. Seems to be a live performance recording of a blues rock group. Bit of disco as well in the middle there, and a hip-hop track for the last one.
MD23: A blue Sony Bianca 74 minute disc. J-Pop and pop rock. First track starts with vocals that seem to take a bit after Blue October, which was the main thing I remembered about this disc after listening. Came with a track listing written on a card in the sleeve, and there are titles set on the disc. Many bad sectors on the disc, which led to some of the tracks cutting out abruptly.
MD22: A blue Sony Color Collection 74 minute disc. Japanese R&B with the odd funk and soft rock track in there. All the same female vocalist. Haven't tried to dig into who it is yet. Track 13 has some fun retro-sounding flute riffs. Track 14 is a jazzy, trip-hoppy track over a bassline that reminds me of Rob Dougan's work from the Matrix soundtrack.
MD21: A black Sony Prism 80 minute disc with a label on the edge marked "SMAP." SMAP was apparently a boy band active from 1988 to 2016. It does indeed sound like 90s boy band music. Lots of synth trumpets, synth strings, orchestra hits, record scratches, and other sounds common to that era feature on these tracks. Not really my preferred sound, but there is a kind of nostalgia to it.
MD20: Another black Sony Prism 74 minute disc. Japanese easy-listening. If the last one was soft rock, this one is Velveeta. Haven't attempted to identify the artist or artists yet, but the titles are set, so it wouldn't be hard if I cared to.
MD19: A black Sony Prism 74 minute disc. Japanese soft rock and pop rock. Haven't attempted to identify the artist or artists yet.
MD18: A blue Maxell "Happy Music, Happy MD Life" 74 minute disc with t.A.T.u written on it in permanent marker. It's exactly that: a mix of t.A.T.u songs, including at least two different renditions of "All the Things She Said."
MD17: A translucent white TDK Clef with the track listing written on the face in permanent marker. J-Pop. Specifically, 12 Koda Kumi songs, one of which I recognized immediately but didn't know the name of until now: "real Emotion." A friend of mine used to play this song a lot when we were driving together.
MD16: A translucent blue Axia 80 minute disc. Mostly Japanese metal, punk, and rock. Track 12 is a slower, retro rock ballad that stands out from the faster paced music on the rest of this disc. Encoded in LP4, but for what purpose? There are only 18 tracks here, leaving an hour of unrecorded SP mode space.
MD15: A blue TDK Lucir 74 minute disc. Had a hard time putting a label to the style of music on this disc at first. I was thinking "1950s/1960s cinematic music" or "old Western-style musical." Then the very final track dropped: the theme from Rawhide. And... that's the style. It's music similar to that theme song.
MD14: A yellow Prime Media Color Collection 80 minute disc. Instrumental drum and bass for the first five tracks, then it switches to a more downtempo electronic reggae track for track 6, then it's back to the drum and bass. Titles all set, so I can easily look things up later if I like.
MD13: A red Saehan Natural Wave 80 minute disc. The first LP4 encoded disc I've listened to. (The talk radio ones purported to be SP in mono.) The audio quality was better than I was expecting. I remember the highly compressed MP3s I listened to on my 64MB MP3 player as a teenager sounding far worse. 41 tracks on this one, almost entirely J-Pop and J-Rock.
MD12: A yellow Victor Color Palette 74 minute disc. Songs recorded from the radio in stereo. Mostly J-Pop, but the last song is entirely in English and sounds like Coldplay (it's not). Short, just seven songs, or thirty minutes, long.
MD11: A red Victor Color Palette 74 minute disc. Similar to MD10, it's about two and a half hours of mono radio recording. Seems to be pure talk radio this time. The station is identified as Radio Osaka at one point. I did not listen to the whole thing.
MD10: A purple Victor Color Palette 74 minute disc. Appears to be close to two and a half hours of recordings from a Japanese radio show. Mostly it's the hosts talking, with brief, one minute clips of songs. Did not listen to the whole thing.
MD9: A blue Victor Color Palette 74 minute disc. Just beeps and flashes "ERROR" on my player.
MD8: A teal Victor Color Palette 74 minute disc. Mostly turn-of-the-millenium pop punk in the vein of Mxpx and NOFX, with an instrumental lounge break and one ska track mixed in. It's Hi-Standard's "Making the Road" album, released November 1999.
MD7: A dark blue TDK MDXG 74 minute disc. Seems to be a recording of a vinyl record of a selection from Bizet's Carmen, and from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
MD6: A teal Sunny Techs Pure Sound Collection 80 minute disc. Mostly J-Pop/string-heavy J-Rock and outright J-Pop, but with a couple J-Rap/J-Hip-Hop songs mixed in, and one techno song that would be quite at home in Dance Dance Revolution or the like.
MD5: A blue Sony Color Collection 74 minute disc. All the songs seemed to be by the same artist or band. Throwback indie rock, strong retro vibes. At times I thought "this is basically a Japanese Rooney." Some very blues-heavy turns in there as well. I think this one has been the closest match for my tastes so far.
MD4: A blue TDK Fine 74 minute disc with "DJ HASEBE" written on it. Japanese R&B mostly.
MD3: A black Maxell 74 minute disc. Seems like an amateur recording of some classical Japanese performances! I heard some recitation of poetry in a style I recognized, if I remember correctly, from the Kurosawa film "Kagemusha." This is called shigin, I learned. I also heard some shakuhachi and a lot of audience noise before switching to another disc.
MD2: A yellow, opaque TDK Fine 74 minute disc. I really like the aesthetics of this disc's design. I haven't confirmed it, but from the little bit of searching I've done, I think it's a copy of mihimalife by Mihimaru GT, an album from 2005. Turn of the millenium J-pop.
MD1: A pink 74 minute Maxell disc, heavily worn. My first thought in listening to this was "Japanese country music?" It's a country-tinged, ballad-heavy disc. Not what I'd been expecting from my first pull!
