I was writing another article today and decided to go digging for an album I hadn’t heard in years, simply because the name had begun to rattle around in my head. IBUKI. I remembered next to nothing about what the music actually sounded like but I did remember the moments I had spent with the music. I ran the lake, panting and gasping like a fish out of water, with this music blasting in my ears. So I decided to do a Spotify search for him. I found a bunch of Ibukis, but no IBUKI. So I turned to Google and decided to search for them there. And that’s when the obsession started to blossom in my head.
There were two pages of results none of them relating to music. I felt like I was going crazy. How could something just be gone from the internet? Poof. Without a trace. I checked Soundcloud and Bandcamp too, every little morsel of info I would find would lead me to a dead end. I found a link to a twitter account, only to find that it had been deactivated.
There are two types of holes on the internet, there are rabbit holes, dug by someone and found by you. They lead somewhere and generally you can retrace your steps back. The other type of hole is the one I discovered. A black hole. Someone or something that doesn’t want to be found. Who is IBUKI, the man with the black and red TOP GUN snapback who made sample-heavy electronic jams? Where is he now? Why did he disappear on us? Did he ever exist at all?
I then remembered, luckily, that they had been a member of a Soundcloud label, Baewave. So I searched up Baewave. I found their twitter. Last post: January 6th, 2016. The whole account had been scrubbed clean. What had happened to them? There were at least twenty artists who all were under this label, from various places around the world, and none of them had a presence I could find any more. When I checked YouTube, I found one video that documents their existence. It’s a 20 minute long mixtape with one IBUKI song on it. So they existed, maybe. It could be misattributed.
There’s something that happens when I can’t find something, I start to panic, like my brain has misaligned everything, I start tearing at every seam I can find. But under no bed cover would I find IBUKI, and in no pants pocket would I find a copy of the Real Life EP.
It almost seems unbelieveable that something like this would happen. I feel like in the common consciousness, people think that the internet exists as this eternal archive, where everything is set in stone forever, but more and more, I’m realizing that that isn’t quite true. There are all sorts of things that slip through the cracks. Some things small, like this album I’ve been searching the last whole day for, and some things large, like news articles or criminal records. With this continued insertion of the internet into our daily lives, please remember that things can still disappear into the ether. Save your files, save your memories. It’s all on a timer, but you never know for how long.
