Mailbox: Cheap Love Hotel – sexting w my besty

If you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity over the past 6 months, you’ve probably encountered one of my references to this breed of quasi-breakcore jungle-inspired internet music that I’ve hastily been describing as online jungle (as distinct from internetcore/webcore which seems much too broad a term to adequately capture this stuff). The breakcore-adjacent gaming-influenced microgenre seems to be proliferating quickly, not least because of the growth of the dreamstation discord, which also maintains dreamstation.fm and its live radio feed. To be fair, folks on dreamstation just seem to call this breakcore, without qualification, but I’m old and come from a time when breakcore was a lot more abrasive than most of the stuff I’m hearing coming from the dreamstation users. Plus, the dreamstation radio feed goes as far as playing house music sometimes, which isn’t a knock, but does detract from its authority re: the term breakcore.

One artist pursuing this style (though I’m not actually sure they’re active on dreamstation) is Cheap Love Hotel, based in Japan. Ripe with plenty of discord-friendly gaming humor and detail (again I’m old, but this still reminds me a lot of IRC channels or AOL chatrooms), and based in-principle on hollow bass stabs, and jungle-style breakbeat and sample manipulation, Cheap Love Hotel’s debut album sexting w my besty is real fun. The album fits in with the work of other artists in the genre, for sure, but is also generally more whimsical and idiosyncratic, often favoring hiphop sampling techniques and chopped jazz riffs instead of more serious melancholia and giant pads. This may partly be attributable to Japan’s rich raregroove and acid jazz scenes, but I can’t confirm that. In any case, the record is still squarely in online jungle territory, as far as I’m concerned, including because it embraces the shortform—of its sixteen songs, only one is over three minutes.

sexting with my besty is out now on all the streamers, or you can grab it on bandcamp. Cheap Love Hotel has also been generous enough to let me share with you the mp3s of three tracks from the album, including the title track, which is definitely my favorite from the record.

Cheap Love Hotel – “sexting w my besty” (mp3)