event report: Tokyo Dennou SYNC [1/8/2026]

Aug. 8, 2026 11:15 PM

alternative title: MadokaP and Hatsune Miku fan get lost in Vauxhall for 30 minutes

During my last year of sixth form, I would be in possession of a very quiet Friday. Only one class, English Language, occupied what should have otherwise been a strange regular day with no classes. Being that my teacher for this class, who I otherwise only saw on Monday, was a father of two, I very frequently ended up attending Friday to realise that I would not have my one lesson to finish the week. My Fridays were thus usually spent on vagrancy, journeying around the central London area at 12:49PM with little else in mind aside from perusing for anime.

This has almost nothing in relation to what I did prior to this event, but it was a funny anecdote of my life that I hope establishes perspective on how it feels travelling around London for purposes other than work and avoiding such.

I came across the announcement for this event sometime during my June break, mindlessly sifting through Danbooru between writing and working, as is standard for database crusadists of habit. I recalled one previous UK event from a year prior, SiDE EFFECTS - "wouldn't it be fun to go to one of these?", I thought to myself. So I took down notes, thought about when to buy my ticket, and sat on it for a few more weeks. (Read: basically the whole of June.)

As will become something of a catchphrase for this writeup, I must stress that I know very little of DEN-ON-BU on a conceptual level. Sure, I've heard about it. Many of the composers featured here have also worked on Gakuen IDOLM@STER to some degree. (Compare the producer lists for both properties.) At most, I know that Login Records has released a couple of remix albums that I've seen around. Login Records also happens to be a favourite doujin label of mine, so it probably explains why my functional knowledge of this series is tied solely to a random connection like this. Perhaps memory association really does work in strange ways.

Regardless, who am I to deny good tunes? I thought it'd be a good chance to enjoy time away from work, so I called upon fellow otaku and arcade friend of mine in Storm to ask if they were down for this event. We got our tickets, and then we embarked on the worst part of any social gathering - planning.

---

the part where you eat food before a rave for some reason

It's customary to eat good before a music event. I don't know who established this rule. Of course, you should eat well after an event, too. Anyone who's seen Majin Obama's horror stories about post-hangout meal deals should know what I'm alluding to here. This is besides the point.

We meet at CocoIchi in Leicester Square. It's like 30 seconds away from the Underground stop. Perfect. It's like 4PM, we have like an hour and a half to waste, so we just chill. I'm not gonna provide a food review. The katsu curry here does unfortunately hit crazy style. Central London jacks up prices harder than [COMPARISON REDACTED] for good food, but it was nice. You can probably note from the image for this segment that I forgot to take a picture, so I had to use an old foodpost sourced back from when I still had a Twitter account for silly posts. (Ironically, the order for this trip was pork katsu instead.)

The next hour is basically pre-amble. We're catching up, thinkin' about the audience for this event, what kinda music we expect to hear, what the fuck a 'DEN-ON-BU' even is, all that shit. We had a big-ass fly circling around us the whole time as well, which definitely boosted the mood. Usual London fare. It's no conversation about whether cannabis usage deserves capital punishment over Japanese fish & chips, but we don't always win battles.

Now the question remains - how do we reach this damn venue? Something I didn't mention earlier on in this post is that I actually asked Storm, word for word, "did you look up this place and it gave you a location vaguely like where we're going, but not really?" I can almost imagine you, dear reader, thinking something insane will happen on the way here. Thankfully not.

However, what did happen is that we had to take a considerable detour. To reach the venue after food, we had to take a very roundabout path. The nearest station in Leicester Square happens to be in central London. On a Saturday afternoon. This meant the entire Underground was crammed with people, to the result where a literal queue started forming in this cramped space. We ended up walking down the road to Embankment, taking a route down nearby... and then we walked. Oh, did we walk. It appears online maps are the devil, truly and honestly. Our phones gave us vaguely similar directions, just different enough that we couldn't quite average out a good line. Cue both of us walking aimlessly through Vauxhall for what amounted to like 30 minutes of rambling about G-Witch, sharing meme videos, and debating whether London gentrification is real when crime is still a thing in the more suburban areas. Very long story.

First admission was at 5:30PM, so you know we're off to a great start when it's like 6PM and we're still a few minutes away on foot. What really surprised me upon arrival was that it looked like barely anyone had actually entered yet. There was a pretty long line stretching from the door down about halfway across the footpath under the bridge, which I didn't take a picture of, but remember thinking about a bit. Storm and I used this time looking at what to expect from DEN-ON-BU, or at least, anything we could try to expect, with cars and trains basically occupying the entire soundscape around us. Usual security bag check stuff, I know how it works as someone who (unfortunately) currently works in security. It was actually really lax compared to my workplace's standards, which made me quite confused. They barely took more than a cursory glance, which made me wonder if I'm in the wrong job that pays my bills and lets me do this. Concerning.

We eventually made it in around 6:30PM, which was unfortunately around when the opening act wrapped up. Good time to talk about the venue!

---

vaguely small club experience, or "hey this music is good"

Describing this as a 'small' venue is a misnomer of sorts. It's hardly a closet by any stretch of the imagination, but it definitely appears a tad more organised compared to some of the crazy places one can envision. It had a bar directly behind the main area, there was a ramp leading to the restrooms to the left, and you had enough space to walk around. Pretty alright, I'd say. Attendance was quite a surprise for me, personally - I estimate about 70-80 people were around as the event picked up, which ended up in a pretty lively atmosphere once we hit the hour mark. You had a mix of actual Tokyo Den-nou fans, vocal bank nerds, people like me (otaku, mainly here for the underground music), and what I could only describe as a subset of attendee old enough to pirate Garzey's Wing. YEAH.

The first half of the event (~18:00 - 20:30) was filled with tons of anirave bangers. An overwhelming amount of the notes I have written down on the event directly covers the acts during this timeframe, and it showed quite often in the crowd. Having absolutely no experience with DEN-ON-BU events, I had few expecations as to what kind of music would feature as we reached the headliner act, but I was pleasantly excited to hear a lot of the underground Japanese hardcore vibes you'd hear at small events! Having an overlap between the various demographics of anime remix fans and Japanese hardcore certainly helped me push through what I wasn't familiar with - I'm ultimately here for good music, and I definitely got hype.

A repost of the event announcement by DJ SARIA is what first made me aware of this event, so hearing them here made me much less of a fish out of water after hearing a ton of anisongs that flew right over my head. I recognised at least one track during the set from the newest release by SHIN SEKAI amidst everything, which was cool. Overall, their set was full of proper J-core tunes alongside some of the anime stuff that everyone was expecting - I'm always a fan for some proper hard dance and J-core adjacent music in the wild. Call me slightly biased. Representing this side of the underground music scene will never fail to excite me, so I'm eagerly awaiting the set list to check out what I missed - nonetheless my favourite set of the event! My phone unfortunately nearly died at this point, meaning I had to stop taking proper notes for a good while. Curse of 2020 phone.

The sets by SARE and AdvanceRatio sandwiched the aforementioned very nicely. I am very much unaware of the vtuber and modern anime ecosystem, especially the OPs that everyone knows and tends to remix nowadays. That didn't stop me from recognising a bootleg of 'IRIS OUT' or 'Umapyoi Densetsu', which I definitely noticed got the crowd amped like crazy. Everyone knows banger. A really funny part to the AdvanceRatio set was 'Ever Free' by Massive New Krew, which absolutely threw me for a loop. It's these kinds of surprises that keep me digging for mixes at small events, even if it's a very specific kind of pick that only a couple of people would recognise. I was definitely feeling that way here, but I always enjoy hearing tracks I recognise in unconventional places. It's fun!!

At risk of sounding critical, I felt the energy definitely hit conservation mode after these sets. I think the setlists offered here were a bit too hype at points, as it felt like everyone started to cool off a bit in preparation for the main act of Tokyo Den-nou. Not to say the other acts were any less great, by any means! I'm still looking out for setlists (when/if they'll ever drop) for a lot of tracks I wanted to revisit from this night, but it was very high-energy from the start with very little breathing room to let it sink in. The mid-event ICHIGORINAHAMU feature was a great refresher, one I certainly enjoyed a lot in spite of not recognising any of the songs throughout, and she had a TON of fun performing at a homely kind of avenue like this. It's not quite grassroots, but calling it 'underground' is also a bit of a misnomer. Without any better choice of words, it was a joyous environment.

Speaking of features and headliners, the main act in Tokyo Den-nou was amazing. They really knew how to reinvigorate the crowd after four long hours, with a setlist that started out low-energy and gradually working the mood back up to speed. Memory on this front is hazy, especially as I did a 12-hour shift the day before coming here and was extremely tired by this point, but the crowd was at its peak during this set. It's been a long time since I've heard a crowd at a small venue go loud in nearly the same way as it did tonight, and even so, I cannot argue one bit with how much passion there was here. You'd be forgiven in thinking I'm running out of notes at this point, but there is only so much I can reference with text before I start going "you just had to be there" ad infinitum. It's the kind of not-quite underground sensation that reminds you events like these are very much still happening, and that demand for them is very well still alive.

Borrowing my self-imposed catchphrase that I know nothing about DEN-ON-BU, there was definitely enough musical variety for everyone to have fun in some way throughout the night. Something I joked about with Storm as time went on is that an underlying theme of the event was hardstyle, because wow oh boy did we hear a lot of hardstyle. I was honestly surprised to hear it so represented, perhaps misunderstanding that DEN-ON-BU is known for many hardstyle remixes, bootlegs, flips, et al. that seem to fit with the anirave crowd. You must forgive my lack of trend awareness on this front. In spite of all this, hearing a lot of the hard dance and high-energy rave from across the spectrum reminded me that one won't know every music trend being played at clubs. Hanging about the niche shit gone big like CAR CRASH & SIREN, or subsisting predominantly on reuploads of end-of-year MOGRA sets, paints a very irregular picture you can't really finish without throwing yourself at the proverbial brick wall of music you've never really listened to for one reason or another. I didn't know a thing about DEN-ON-BU, and I frankly still don't, even now - none of that stopped me having a good time.

One point about the actual venue that I forgot to mention is that the VJs for this event must have either gone double time, or had a ton of wild ideas they needed to actualise in some way. I'm no stranger to surreal VJ work, having watched the archives for CAR CRASH & SIREN 3 last year, which I'm convinced has gaslit me into believing this is standard now. There was a similar kind of wackiness at Dennou SYNC, often bouncing around saturated clips from random popular anime, eroge, and videos I'm like 65% certain have like 3 digit view counts on NND. I got to see Tokyo Den-nou play out while the kinds of incomprehensible early-90s 3D-generated animations Bocchi the Rock parodied in episode 11 happens to be playing behind them. This part didn't show up in the few pictures I took, which I regret not documenting for my own personal fascination, but the venue had small displays playing the VJ reels to the left and right of the area behind the seating at the bar counter, which honestly made the viewer experience so fuckin' sick. Combine that with the lengthy overhead display (which I did capture in my photos!) mirroring the visuals up front, and it honestly made the night an incredible sensory package. More places should have random displays. It owns.

---

journey back, & concluding thoughts

Pretty much everything I wanted to say about this event has already been outlined in the previous sections, so I'll use this last segment to summarise my experience, while also briefly mentioning anything that didn't really fit before.

Events like these are a good outlet to remind oneself that nothing you read online about subculture matters when you are on the floor. Countless net 'pundits' will regurgitate nonsense about how "music is dead now" and that good ol' days of rave are over because everybody got obsessed with K-pop instead of... I don't know, Transcend. Not that one. Twitter "otaku" won't hesitate in letting you know that playing YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love at the Bound of This World is required engagement to appropriate such a title, but scarcely offer identical praise to our ancestry in J-CORE MASTERZ and BASTARD POP TERRORISTS with nearly the same kind of enthusiasm. Otaku music deserves equal acknowledgment to other areas of the culture, irrespective of your thoughts on flipping anime songs.

Seeing recent events like this and SiDE EFFECTS bringing the anirave style of otaku music culture to the UK is a development I'd happily welcome more of. Having the money (and the ability to find excuses for time) to attend more of these has maintained my optimism for underground nerd events to continue proliferating internationally, even as rising costs dissuade hosts and organisers from taking the plunge. It's crucial for themed parties like these to continue existing for everyone involved - it gives people another way to discover new music of all sorts, highlights upcoming talent while also promoting established figures, forms the basis for social gathering, and keeps the related music scenes involved alive in some form. People underestimate the positives of a good event.

While I fathom the UK is not quite ready for days where MOGRA-styled seasonal parties and niche subculture events like DESIRE 2 DOUJIN adorn calendars, there's evidently more yearning for parties and events like this in the real world that could very well bloom out here in the UK. I personally find myself needing greater reason to attend future events like the focus of this coverage beyond "I recognise a DJ who's playing here so I might as well take a look" - this alone should not be enough for I, or anyone else, to hunt for esoteric sounds. Tokyo Dennou SYNC offered a good taste of what I can expect across the pond, so you can guarantee I will make an effort to attend similar, if anything else within travelling (and budget) distance comes up on my radar.

If there's one final thought I can offer regarding my time at this event, it's that music is something so great. I'll definitely listen to more DEN-ON-BU if what showed up here managed to leave a positive impression, but it's ultimately not about whether an event upholds its central theme that makes it noteworthy, or special. Atmosphere is mission critical - in that sense, everyone involved understood the assignment, with some extras. Moments like these are hard to come by for someone increasingly detached from the internet like I am, but continuing to attend, and cover, whatever I happen to find goes a long way in the wish for these events to become more frequent an opportunity.

Long live the lights.