These two days will reaffirm that Japanese rap didn’t grow up solely on the main streets of major labels.
On February 3, 1986, a company was born in Shibuya as SFC Music Publishing Co., Ltd., and for the next 40 years it has supported the bloodstream of Japan’s independent music. Ultra-Vybe Corporation — commonly known as ULTRA-VYBE. Its 40th anniversary live event “ULTRA-VYBE 40th Anniversary Event ‘FORTH FROM FORTY'” will take place across two days — Sunday, May 10, 2026 and Saturday, June 20, 2026 — both at Ebisu LIQUIDROOM in Tokyo. As reported by Natalie.mu on April 20, Day 1 features LIBRO, 漢 a.k.a. GAMI & D.O, DJ KRUSH, and 田我流. Day 2 features THA BLUE HERB, SHINGO★西成, TOKYO世界, and GADORO. Each artist performs a 40-minute set, for a total of eight acts across the two nights.
This is not a one-off “nostalgia festival.” A company that releases more than 2,000 titles a year and handles distribution for approximately 1,500 labels (the operational scale Ultra-Vybe disclosed in CDJournal’s 35th anniversary announcement) is gathering, in a single venue, eight acts who have embodied Japanese rap’s “keep doing it independently” way of life. That fact itself is the center of gravity of this event.
The “Heat” on the Ground of Japanese Rap
The history of Japanese rap cannot be measured by release information or charts alone. At the actual venues, there are moments when countless hands reach toward the stage, voices fly, and the lights of smartphones sway. HIPHOPCs has repeatedly visited live venues for Japanese rap and confirmed that heat firsthand. Building on that experience, ULTRA-VYBE’s 40th anniversary event looks less like a mere anniversary show and more like a place to reconfirm the on-the-ground history of Japanese rap — a history sustained by the people who make the work, the people who deliver it, and the listeners who receive it.
Event Details
ULTRA-VYBE 40th Anniversary Event “FORTH FROM FORTY” DAY 1
Date: Sunday, May 10, 2026 — OPEN 17:30 / START 18:30
Venue: Ebisu LIQUIDROOM, Tokyo
Ticket: ADV. ¥5,000 (one-drink fee charged separately)
Lineup: LIBRO / 漢 a.k.a. GAMI & D.O / DJ KRUSH / 田我流
ULTRA-VYBE 40th Anniversary Event “FORTH FROM FORTY” DAY 2
Date: Saturday, June 20, 2026 — OPEN 17:30 / START 18:30
Venue: Ebisu LIQUIDROOM, Tokyo
Lineup: THA BLUE HERB / SHINGO★西成 / TOKYO世界 / GADORO
Tickets: e+ earliest pre-sale open until 23:59 on Sunday, May 17
Organized, produced, and planned by: Ultra-Vybe Corporation
*For Day 2 pricing and general-sale information, please refer to e+’s official ticket page.
Who is ULTRA-VYBE? The “Bloodstream” in Numbers
For listeners, ULTRA-VYBE is most often encountered as the distributor name quietly printed on the spine of a CD. That makes sense: the operational scale Ultra-Vybe discloses in its own information on iFlyer and in CDJournal’s 35th anniversary announcement (February 2021) is as follows. Approximately 10,000 titles handled, approximately 1,500 labels handled, and more than 2,000 titles released per year. Its trading partners include major CD retailers — Tower Records, HMV, TSUTAYA, Disk Union, Yamano Music, Amazon, Seikodo, Happinet — as well as the full range of streaming platforms such as Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and RecoChoku.
In other words, when an artist or label wants to release work without connecting to major-capital infrastructure and still deliver it to CD shops and DSPs nationwide simultaneously, one realistic option is ULTRA-VYBE — a structure that has been built over 40 years. On the structure of Japan’s rap streaming market, HIPHOPCs Intelligence Series Vol. 1 analyzes the topic in depth; the current rap market is composed of three layers — streaming, physical, and live — and the importance of the mid-layer infrastructure that underpins them is, if anything, increasing.
Founder Mamoru Kō (高護) is also a writer who has edited and published culture magazines such as Quarterly Remember and HOTWAX. In its early in-house label “Solid Records,” the company reissued unreleased recordings by Happy End, Hachimitsu Pai, and Zunō Keisatsu, and in 1989 released the debut album Vibra is Back by Harumi Chikada & Vibrastone (as detailed in the chronology on the Wikipedia entry “Ultra-Vybe”). A double identity — record company and music-history archivist — has been consistent since its founding.
The company’s involvement with Japanese rap sits on that same extension. The first releases on its in-house label Ultrax, launched in 2017, were, as Musicman reported in August 2017, three titles: the album SWEET HELL by leading Japanese hip-hop producer I-DeA, rapper 輪入道’s “Concrete Blues feat. 伊集院幸希,” and エマーソン北村’s “Kara Mado / Ame no Saka no Ashimoto.” Scanning the recent news section of ULTRA-VYBE’s official site, names such as EVISBEATS & Nagipan, 韻踏合組合, ZORN, 神門, DOGMA, なみちえ, どんぐりず, hnt., and BOMB WALKER cycle through — rap works that cross generations and styles, moving on a daily basis.
Day 1: Four Acts Showing “How to Survive” From the 1990s Underground
The four Day 1 acts are artists who, in the era before Japanese rap was framed as “hit-parade J-POP,” were updating the architecture of words and sound in the underground.
LIBRO has built his career since the late 1990s as an MC/producer who makes his own tracks. His poetic, lyrical style — sometimes labeled “jojō-ha” (lyrical school) — has expanded the expressive territory of Japanese rap along an axis different from the loud reality of the streets.
漢 a.k.a. GAMI & D.O are central figures in MSC / Kusari Group. As the head of Libra Records, 漢 has demonstrated indie distribution in practice, through the records themselves. His autobiography Hip Hop Dream (Kodansha, 2015) has become an unusually long-running bestseller among books related to Japanese rap.
DJ KRUSH is a DJ/producer who defined Japanese rap’s instrumental and abstract hip-hop on a global scale. Including his international releases on Mo’ Wax, he is one of the most internationally known Japanese hip-hop artists on the club circuit abroad.
田我流 belongs to stillichimiya and is an MC who delivers the on-the-ground sensibility of Yamanashi City, Yamanashi Prefecture, directly to the whole country. He has embodied, ahead of the curve, the tectonic shift in Japanese rap since the 2010s — the shift where “work can reach the country without passing through Tokyo.”
Day 2: Four Acts Who’ve Sustained “Independent Labels”
The four Day 2 acts have all continued to release work over long periods within an independent/self-managed framework.
THA BLUE HERB was formed in Sapporo in 1997 by rapper ILL-BOSSTINO (BOSS THE MC) and track-maker O.N.O. DJ DYE joins for live performances. According to Natalie.mu’s artist profile, over a career of more than 28 years — from their 1998 debut album STILLING, STILL DREAMING, through SELL OUR SOUL (2002), LIFE STORY (2007), TOTAL (2012), and their 2019 self-titled THA BLUE HERB — they have released every single work through their own label, THA BLUE HERB RECORDINGS. Many listeners have considered their street-oriented material, in particular, raw enough to register as a kind of arrival point for Japanese rap.
In an interview between Shō Sakurai and snowboarder Ayumu Hirano on Nippon TV’s news zero (broadcast February 11, 2022), Hirano named THA BLUE HERB as the music he listened to immediately before his third run in the Beijing Olympics men’s snowboard halfpipe final. That broadcast triggered a surge of “#THABLUEHERB” posts on Twitter the following day, Tower Records’ official site ran a feature page, and the group’s name reached well beyond the underground — still a fresh memory.
SHINGO★西成 is based in Nishinari-ku, Osaka. ULTRA-VYBE’s official site has announced a music video for his new single “Jā, Yatte Miyō” as “the opening of his 30th-anniversary year” in 2026. In other words, his career counts 30 years from around 1996. The word-craft that lets local reality and prayer share a single line is also alive in “Umarete Kita Kara ni wa” — a new song by chotto dog (a unit of SHINGO★西成 and G.S.M a.k.a. にゅらりひょん) delivered via ULTRA-VYBE on April 1, 2026. It isn’t a famous track, but the ability to make this kind of piece while “just keeping going” is surely part of his talent.
TOKYO世界 is a younger-generation MC. As ULTRA-VYBE’s official site and Spincoaster reported, in March 2026 he released “Sprout,” the theme song for the zombie film Zombie 1/2 — Right Side of the Living Dead, via ULTRA-VYBE, with a music video published that April. Placing him in the same two-day lineup as DJ KRUSH, whose career spans 40 years, is a booking from the next-generation side.
GADORO is from Miyazaki. After winning KING OF KINGS in 2016 and 2017 — the first-ever back-to-back titleholder — he fully retired from MC battles and devoted himself to recordings and live performance. On March 6, 2025, he held a successful one-man show at Nippon Budokan titled “Yojōhan kara Budōkan” (From a Four-and-a-Half-Mat Room to Budokan) — a trajectory HIPHOPCs covered in detail in its Deep Dive Column. He operates his own label, “Four Mud Arrows,” from Takanabe Town in Miyazaki Prefecture — a representative example of the regional, independent-self-reliance model.
“When the Bloodstream Becomes Visible” — The Historical Link Between DJ KRUSH and THA BLUE HERB
DJ KRUSH on Day 1 and THA BLUE HERB on Day 2. They won’t share a stage — they perform on different days — but they are strongly tied together at a certain juncture in Japanese rap history.
According to the Wikipedia entry “Tha Blue Herb” and related sources, DJ KRUSH frequently spun “Chie no Wa (THIRD HALLUCINATION CHAOS)” — an analog single THA BLUE HERB released in 1997 — in his club sets, and also listed the track on his own playlist published in remix magazine. Through that, THA BLUE HERB — then a “no-name MC from Sapporo” — reached DJs and listeners nationwide all at once. Before the era of instant internet delivery, a single analog record and the ears of a single DJ connected a regional artist to the entire country. That is the underlying experience.
Behind both DJ KRUSH and THA BLUE HERB, one of the distribution networks that kept sending CDs and LPs to record shops nationwide was ULTRA-VYBE’s distribution. The metaphor “bloodstream” doesn’t sound overblown precisely because of the accumulation of specific historical facts like this. The very fact that both acts will stand on the same venue (Ebisu LIQUIDROOM) across the 40th-anniversary two-day run is already, in itself, a record.
Regional Currents — Proof That the 40-Year Bloodstream Still Flows
Among the eight acts, artists born and based in Tokyo are actually a minority. THA BLUE HERB (Sapporo), SHINGO★西成 (Osaka), 田我流 (Yamanashi), GADORO (Miyazaki), and the sound DJ KRUSH brings back from traveling the world — the Day 2 lineup in particular captures with remarkable density the 20-year shift by which Japanese rap moved its center of gravity from “the Tokyo scene” to “a collection of on-the-ground scenes scattered across different cities.”
And this regional model is alive in 2026 as well. As HIPHOPCs reported in detail on the March 9, 2026 first Nippon Budokan one-man show by Tokushima-based rapper Watson, a single rapper built a voice — different in style from streaming-era formats — out of Tokushima, and reached the Budokan stage without going through Tokyo or Osaka. The current that 田我流 (Yamanashi), GADORO (Miyazaki), and THA BLUE HERB (Sapporo) opened — “from the regions to the whole country” — has not been cut off; it runs thicker, generation by generation.
To release work from the regions and reach listeners nationwide without passing through Tokyo’s big-capital infrastructure, an artist needs partners who can share distribution, digital delivery, and promotion. ULTRA-VYBE has functioned for 40 years as one such partner. That the performing artists’ home bases are not concentrated in a single city is no coincidence.
What “FORTH FROM FORTY” Confirms
THA BLUE HERB’s live set changes with the air of the day and the venue — ILL-BOSSTINO chooses his words accordingly. SHINGO★西成 advances his set almost in conversation with the audience. DJ KRUSH’s sets return hip-hop to its origin — “turntables and a space” — and no two of them are ever the same. A frame of 40 minutes × four acts is just right for each artist to properly present their current position.
In the first half of 2026, Japanese rap has seen a continuous run of cases in which solo artists reach large venues through independent routes — POP YOURS 2026, Tiji Jojo’s Nippon Budokan show “LONG LIVE LOUD”, YZERR’s first solo Toyosu PIT one-man “ROD III Concert”, and more. FORTH FROM FORTY is a place that illuminates that lineage from the opposite direction, on a 40-year time axis. Behind the rappers currently standing at Budokan and arena stages lies soil that ULTRA-VYBE has kept turning — distribution — for 40 years. That is no exaggeration.
A milestone called “40 years” exists precisely so that 40 years of accumulation can be shown at once. The “independent” way that Japanese rap has kept going outside the major frame is still being sounded, live and in person — two days to confirm that fact with your own skin are laid out at Ebisu LIQUIDROOM on May 10 and June 20. We want to deliver to as many ears as possible the moment when a bloodstream that has sustained 10,000 titles and 1,500 labels resonates on stage as human voices.
Tickets are on sale via e+. It’s possible to attend only Day 1 or only Day 2, but if you want to view 40 years of Japanese rap through the lens called ULTRA-VYBE, we recommend the two-day run.
References
・Natalie.mu — Related articles on “ULTRA-VYBE 40th Anniversary Event ‘FORTH FROM FORTY'”
・Spincoaster — “ULTRA-VYBE 40th Anniversary Event, First and Second Announcements” (March 19, 2026 / April 20, 2026)
・Musicman — “Ultra-Vybe, 40th Anniversary Event First Announcement” (March 19, 2026)
・ULTRA-VYBE official site https://www.ultra-vybe.co.jp/
・CDJournal — “Ultra-Vybe 35th Anniversary” (February 2021)
・iFlyer ULTRA-VYBE information
・Musicman — “Ultra-Vybe Launches New Label ‘Ultrax'” (August 2017)
・Wikipedia — “Ultra-Vybe” and “Tha Blue Herb” entries
・Natalie.mu — “THA BLUE HERB” artist profile
・Nippon TV news zero, broadcast February 11, 2022 (Shō Sakurai × Ayumu Hirano interview)
・Number Web — “Was Ayumu Hirano’s ‘I Love THA BLUE HERB’ Inevitable?” (March 3, 2022)
・Tower Records — “Reintroducing the Masterpieces of THA BLUE HERB, Now Drawing Renewed Attention” (February 14, 2022)
