Zdob și Zdub*

Korean shoegaze? Parannoul. They also sing a lot in English, mind you.

No one here has mentioned the band Boris? Japanese, they just took the name from a Melvins. I’ve heard they’re less popular in Japan because they’re less interested in costumes, theatrics, pandering to casual rock listeners, and they never settled on a single sound, doing everything from stoner rock and doom metal to shoegaze, even dream pop, and also collaborated a lot with noise artist Merzbow.

Shout-out for C-pop (Faye Wong has a sweet spot for me) and indie J-pop, Shibuya-kei - ever listened to Pizzicato Five and the Fishmans?

Disclosure: I’m Eastern European and, although I grew up with mostly Anglo-American music, I listen nowadays to music from literally almost everywhere in the world (though most often I focus on African and Asian music). Funnily, I don’t listen to much music from my own country, guess I’m oikophobic. If I were born in the US, I might have nearly “stopped at the border” though, because the US certainly had many musicians doing almost everything you can imagine.

Korean traditional music (gugak) is pretty fascinating, from their fairly well-preserved ancient pieces (in contrast to China), to their intense, almost free-jazz-like mystical shaman music, to a whole semi-classical chamber folk tradition called sanjo, which features a solo instrument improvising melodies to rhythms that gradually get faster, juxtaposed with a drummer who grunts now and then as a form of ad-lib, while the drumming itself is nothing like 4/4 or everything else simple that you mighy expect.

Many Koreans themselves are less interested in raw gugak, so some gugak musicians achieve commercial success by doing on the side fusion gugak, which employs pop and other Western elements, partly on the traditional instruments… A lot of it sounds really watered down compared to the real stuff.