betcover!! Led by musical prodigy Ryūse Ryōjiro. An unconventional force in the Japanese music scene. ‘I don’t care how my music fits into daily life, how fashionable it is, or how cool it sounds. I want to create serious songs that you must think deeply to hear.’ – Ryūse Ryōjiro. Suddenly emerging through time and space. Ryūse Ryōjiro from Chōfu City, Tokyo. Only 25 years old this year. The broken-string guitar found in his grandfather’s room was the beginning. He started creating music in middle school. After releasing the mainstream work ‘Middle School Student’ in 2019, he was highly praised. The band betcover!! led by him has become an unignorable unconventional force in the Japanese music scene. Dark and gloomy, full of provocation. The music is extremely tense and full of poetry. Unmeasurable and uncontrollable. Multiple domestic tours have shocked audiences and rocked venues. Some describe Ryūse as an ‘outlaw’ in the music scene. Unruly and rebellious, disregarding mainstream trends. ‘In an era when music is treated as background music by everyone, I want to create music that cannot be treated as background.’ In the trend where many young people turn to hip-hop and abandon the band format, he takes the opposite path. After leaving the major label, he resumes activities in a DIY way. Performances also expand from solo to a band with several members. Subsequently, betcover!! has consecutively released masterpieces such as ‘Time’ and ‘Egg’, showing that their talent cannot be ignored and receiving high praise at home and abroad. Some say their music sounds similar to King Krule. In Japan, some people think there are traces of Yura Yura Teikoku. Ryūse didn’t explain much about this. After all, he never cares who people say his music resembles. As listeners, betcover!!’s music stirs people’s ‘nostalgia for the glorious past of music’ and kindles the desire for intense emotions. The hard-to-define musicality. The diverse styles and ever-changing live performance formats always explode the senses of the audience. With a jazz-rock backbone, the soft and magnetic singing is interspersed with tragic shouts. Occasionally erupting noise challenges the audience’s limits. They are the most courageous group of people in the music world today. You have to be willing to listen to hear what betcover!! wants to say. In the world of rock, the intersection of music and time. There is no absolute beginning or end. Only the magical transitions between songs hide the ups and downs of life. Every performance is a struggle.
Every performance is a battle for betcover!!. They strive to create a uniqueness in each show that cannot be replicated, making every performance a one-time-only film that cannot be rewound. Each occasion is an ‘incident’, played with a determination to win or die, for themselves and for the audience. Like the calm before the storm, or the moment before the waves crash, everything is about to begin yet seems to have ended. In an era of distortion and instant gratification, where everyone can easily gain traffic through shortcuts, we are grateful that there are still those who treat creation with such dedication and play with an indescribable sense of destiny, prompting self-reflection and evoking sighs about life from the audience. They are the fools in music, led by Ryoji Yanase, the Japanese band betcover!!, with their only exclusive show in Taipei at THE WALL LIVE HOUSE on December 12th, tickets officially on sale at noon on September 29th! ‘People will try to change you, but don’t let them.’ — The fools in time, full text open time 12/12, performance time and duration subject to the live event.
