Perhaps you’ve seen this strangely awesome Japanese music video floating around the internet lately. It’s chock full of style, samplers and mermaids, probably one of the coolest music videos you’ll see all year. The band behind it is Hifana, a Japanese duo, and the backing track is “Wamono,” off their 2005 release Channel H. It’s a CD/DVD release; the CD contains the music, while the DVD contains videos for every album track. Fitting, then, that their label should be W+K Tokyo Lab, a boutique label owned by ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. Because “Wamono” is the sort of slickly-produced, playfully addictive eye candy you’d expect from a creative advertising campaign.

So what, exactly, is Hifana? Sitting somewhere between hip-hop, turntablism and breakbeat, the duo of KEIZOmachine! and Juicy (aka Keizo Fukuda and Jun Miyata) started playing around with samplers around the turn of the century after leaving a belly dance percussion group. The emphasis on percussion remains to this day; nearly every sound on a Hifana track, from the obvious bass beat to the whimsical samples, is a rhythmic component first and foremost. The duo’s other striking feature is their animated alter-egos, as evidenced by the video for “Wamono.” (A cartoon hip-hop group? Where have we seen that before…?) The difference between Hifana and Gorillaz is that the duo show up in the flesh as well. Obviously that’s Fukuda and Miyata at the end of the the “Wamono” track, and they show up in a couple of live-action skits on the Channel H DVD as well.