Night Tempo

Night Tempo is the primary alias of Jung Kyung-ho, a Seoul-based producer and DJ who traverses along vaporwave, city pop, disco, funk, house, and instrumental hip-hop. His buoyant, high-sheen assortment of edits, remixes, and original productions show a deep admiration for Japanese pop music from the tail end of the Shōwa era, more specifically the 1980s, and American pop-R&B of roughly the same period, extending into the early ’90s. Within his prolific discography are dozens of singles and albums dating back to the mid-2010s. Full-length Night Tempo projects include the Showa Idol’s Groove remix series and 2021′s Ladies in the City, a major-label effort made with vocalists and fellow songwriters from multiple generations.
Jung Kyung-ho debuted Night Tempo in 2015 with unauthorized remixes of Japanese pop and American pop-R&B songs, and only a year later released his self-titled first album. Throughout each of the next several years, he issued a few full-lengths, building a sizeable catalog with Nighty Tape and Nighty Tape 86′, Fantasy, Moonrise, and the multi-volume Showa Idol’s Groove project, among other titles released through Hong Kong’s Neoncity Records (and its Future 1980 subsidiary). Night Tempo had progressed quickly from utilizing the voices from his sampled records to recording original material with vocalists. The development culminated with the conceptual dancefloor-oriented album Ladies in the City, on which he was joined by singers such as Mariko Tone (“Endless Mirage”), Pizzicato Five’s Maki Nomiya (“Tokyo Rouge”), Bonnie Pink (“Wonderland”), and Sayumi Michishige (“Night Light”). The LP, Night Tempo’s first for a major label, was released on Universal Music Japan in late 2021. ~ Andy Kellman