Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Prince Shima is the New Music Monday highlight!
Prince Shima is the solo project of Bradley Kurushima, who was born and raised in Victoria and has spent the better part of his life within the music scene in a myriad of bands playing all kinds of genres.
In August 2024, his album Half Earth Socialism was released and doubled as a video game soundtrack.
Since then, Prince Shima has been working at completing several projects he started during the pandemic lockdown, one of which being his latest release, Choose Your Own Adventure.
“This was one of the first projects I started during lockdown,” Prince Shima told Victoria Buzz.
He added that because he finds the inspiration for this one to be a bit darker in nature than some of his other recent projects, he found it difficult to just sit down and finish.
“It took a lot emotionally for me to get through this and it came out of that very dark place of the early pandemic days.”
Prince Shima says that Choose Your Own Adventure was inspired by uncertainty in the media, uncertainty surrounding everyday interactions and the increasing divisiveness he was seeing in the community.
“Everything became very political, about who was getting vaccines and who was not, who was wearing a mask and who was not—everything became super intensely politicized,” he explained.
“It didn’t help that at the time I was binge watching true crime series, podcasts, I blasted through Tiger King, Making a Murderer, all that stuff.”
Prince Shima noted that he had an epiphany, realizing how desensitized he had become to the humanity behind each one of these stories.
“All of this media about crime and things done to other people, it was all very close to memories I had from childhood,” he added.
Some of the ways Prince Shima was able to see the human side of these stories was through local examples of crime: Michael Dunahee’s disappearance, Reena Virk’s murder and the ‘Satanic panic’ that began in Victoria during the 80s.
“Some of these true crime stories are still being exploited in the media, and that sat with me weird because I was born and raised here, I love this place and I feel very protective over the island.”
Choose Your Own Adventure is one of the first albums that Prince Shima has made that includes vocals on all tracks, where often he makes more instrumental music.
“Vocals were a really key component to this album,” he said.
“That’s because the lyrics are a really important piece of the narrative of this album, which has a really clear structure, telling a story.”
The album starts out telling a tale of naivety, then builds to cover ideas of danger or violence on the song “Unmarked Van” before finishing the narrative with coming to grips with these traumas.
The highlight track for this week’s New Music Monday falls into the latter portion of this arc.
Highlight track – “Sundown Curfew”
Prince Shima says the song “Sundown Curfew” adds a third layer to the narrative he was trying to tell through this album.
“I’ve been doing a lot of work recently—most of it unreleased—connected to Japanese Canadian identity and during the pandemic I started to think of my childhood,” said Prince Shima.
“I did an archival interview with the remaining family members of mine who were affected by Japanese internment in World War Two.”
He added that while writing the album, he was often thinking of how children are taught to be afraid of the dangers of the world.
However, in the context of the Second World War, Japanese children themselves became the perceived threat, flipping that narrative on its head.
“I have an uncle who was a 12-year-old boy and was arrested by the RCMP because he was out after the curfew,” said Prince Shima.
“I started thinking about: ‘How does a song change when we re-examine who is the outsider and who is the perceived danger to the community?’”
To try to convey this even further, Prince Shima had a music video shot on an old hand-crank eight millimetre film camera that was from the same era as the internment was taking place.
“We went and shot all of the places where my family had lived and might have been during this time,” he explained.
“Our goal was to film all of these places without any people in it, the idea being: ‘what does a community look like when there are no people there?’”
Check out the video for “Sundown Curfew” by Prince Shima below:
To listen to the rest of Choose Your Own Adventure, check out Prince Shima on Bandcamp, Tidal, Apple Music or Spotify.
Although Prince Shima doesn’t have any upcoming shows, he is collaborating on an art project at the Esquimalt Gorge Pavillion with other Japanese Canadian and Indigenous artists.
More details on that project are yet to come when they become available.
Follow Prince Shima on Instagram to stay up to date with all his artistic endeavours.
Related:
- New Music Monday: CHARMED releases first single ‘Veronica’ on the power of love and loss
- New Music Monday: Trevor Lang quietly releases cosmic country-inspired album from Germany
- New Music Monday: palace oaks cosmically driven to write music for debut album
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“As an independent artist, CFUV is and has always been such a massive key player in getting music out there and casting a spotlight,” said Prince Shima.
“I have eternal gratitude to CFUV for all the support they’ve given my various projects over the years.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Prince Shima in the comments below!
