Zac Bentz: musician, Japanese music fan, and the man behind the mic on Japanator Radio for more than three years.

For those of us with an insatiable urge to rock the latest Japanese music the constant problem boils down to pretty much one thing: exposure to new bands. We need it. We crave it like our backs are burdened by violent chimps screeching bloody murder and insistent upon getting a fix.

We scour the internet looking for some sort of gleaming, golden source. We scrap together clues from fan sites and forums and navigate a treacherous path through sketchy, virus-ridden download sites itching for credit card information and a hard drive to sully.

At least, that’s what we used to do before Japanator Radio.

For more than three years and 163 episodes, Japanese music aficionado Zac Bentz has slaved away at his computer to bring us continuing installments of his hour-long podcast via Japantor.com (a Japanese and more specifically otaku cultue news site).

Recently, Japanator Radio has switched to a bi-monthly format with newcomer Ben Huber taking the reigns for every other episode. So far, Huber’s offerings have focused much more on music related to anime and video game soundtracks than Bentz’ straight-up, band-centric podcasts.

Nihongaku sat down (virtually anyway) with Mr. Bentz for a run down on the new tag-team format as well as what goes into making an episode of Japanator Radio.

Nihongaku: How did you initially get into Japanese music?

Zac Bentz: Well, it goes back to when I first got into anime, back around 1994 or so. A friend of mine was into tape trading, basically a network of people really into anime who would dub VHS taps and trade (through the mail) what they had for what someone else had and so on. So we would end up getting all kinds of random stuff. I was always into music since I was a kid (I was 18 in 1994), so naturally I was interested in some of the stuff in those shows. A lot of it was your typical poppy anime music-bed type stuff, but every once in a while there was a real band and my interest just grew from there.

Later, I was a DJ at a local college station. (I ended up working there for about 13 years.) We started getting compilations in called Japan Not for Sale. There were three of them that I can remember, later continued as Japan for Sale. Anyway, that’s where I found bands like Supercar, Boom Boom Satellites, Polysics and Puffy and that really opened up an entirely new world of music.

It was all downhill from there!
Read More »