This Crack Team of Japanese DJs Is Obessed With Bacon

We'll get to EDM or whatever in a second, but first, a more pressing concern for carnivores: we may have reached peak bacon. It's unclear that bacon as popular foodstuff and cultural force will go beyond its current point of saturation—approximately 6.5 million likes on Facebook and nearly 37 thousand followers on Twitter's @allbacon). Moreover, as with all peak resources, there have been fear-mongering prophesies of global bacon shortages by the USDA and Britain's National Pig Association (you probably shouldn't believe the hype, although that didn't stop the die-hards from hoarding sowbelly stock at their local supermarkets.)

Hopefully, bacon's online presence won't wane with its physical paucity, and digital archivists will continue to obsessively catalogue bacon memes, because it's hard to think of a food more akin to the Internet—a one-note but nonetheless addictive experience relying mostly on saltiness. You can pretty much imagine anyone saying "U mad?" to also be snacking on a strip of bacon, even Cam'ron himself, unless he keeps halal.

But no need to wait for the baconapocalypse to start your bacon bacchanalia. Google "bacon" and you'll see this a few rows down:

What you're seeing here is a veritable Bacon of bacon—a testament to the theory of peak bacon, insofar as I can't imagine Kevin Bacon getting any more popular than he was in the mid-90s, when he was so ubiquitous that three Pennsylvania college students were able to demonstrate small world theory via a game of linking any key grip or Univision actress to the actor by six degrees at most (I know, not the actual way it's played, but me vale verga).

Said game demonstrates further synchronicity between bacon and its homonyms and the Internet, and by that I mean six degrees of Kevin Bacon trained us for the Internet. I'm willing to hear the argument that Kevin Bacon is some Spinozan substance comprising all of reality, everything being just different modes and modulations of Kevin Bacon. But what I'm suggesting is that the game trained people, under the guise of achieving a specific goal (ie. get to the Bacon), to perform random walks from one conceptual point A to another conceptual point B. Which is the kind of semi-free association you do everyday with your laptop and a WIFI connection. But the beauty of most free association is arguably that it ends at some point, that you stop wandering and look back on your travels, able to understand a tenuous but beautiful linkage between waypoints. Free association on the internet, on the other hand, tends towards an all-consuming click-fugue—as much bacon as your retina-gullet can handle.

It makes sense then that a Tumblr focused on Kevin Bacon would offer some relief from our online embarrassment of riches. Treat Bacon Index as a gift. Sparsely decorated and mostly in Japanese, Bacon Index is the online tether that will keep you in orbit around Bacon—but with enough slack to include not only the Bacon Bacon, but the almost Bacon, the like Bacon, the of Bacon. Some highlights:

Kevin Bacon kneeling by a Thanksgiving turkey.

Pig-variety bacon in an alarming bubblegum pink, as featured on Juicy J's Instagram.

This pastel portrait of Kevin Bacon with green Joker hair in beveled digital planes like some sort of horrific MS-Paint sand mandala.

This as well:

If you can tear your eyes away from the image stream, you'll also notice all sorts of navigation to possibly non-Kevin Bacon related content up at the top of the page, including some mixes, which are uniformly pretty fantastic and will be expounded upon in a moment.

But first: it turns out Bacon Index is a loose collection of Japanese DJs, artists, and designers. After some email juggling I got in touch with someone going by Stttr by way of fellow member Pootee (who made these amazing K-Pop chopped and screwed mixes a while ago—proving that when you downpitch and add insistent, crawling closed hihats and intermittent snares, even the most psychotically upbeat song can possess a mammoth, tank-treaded groove).

"We live in different cities of Japan," Stttr told me. "There are core members but there are many people in the world who help us (e.g. by offering DJ mixes, texts etc.) so we can't count the number. We only see each other when we organize or participate in a party. We met on Internet and we think the basis of our activity is Tumblr so we are cool about that." As for the Kevin Bacon-philia, Bacon members share the 90s obsession so common to this strange corner of the Internet. "We basically love Kevin Bacon and all we do is inspired by and dedicated to Kevin Bacon," said Stttr. "We also love actors and actresses of his generation. Our parties are named after them. Our first party was BACON. Our regular party in Osaka is MOORE. We also had a boat party TOM in Osaka. American movies of mid-80s to mid-90s is really our taste. Especially adolescence movies and New Age movies."

Adolescent New Age is a fair description for a number of the Bacon mixes, which triangulate what some asshole ten years ago would call world music with ambient and experimental compositions, plus the fairly well-trod post-Fade2Mind house/trap/whatever Internet musical landscape we seem to live in. They're accompanied by some sort of repetitive visual à la DIS Magazine's mixes, with an unusual insistence on looping Vimeo files to provide track listings.

For example, "Venus Plus X," BCNMIX01 by Japanese DJ Panparth (Google Translate Twitter bio aftertaste: "I like to see the chronology such as map Zhuang pools space fart") has a particularly mascara'd looking Kevin Bacon photoshopped onto some buxom blonde woman doing the over-the-shoulder pose, as what resembles medical scanning tech renditions of platelets cast shadows on a scrubs-blue background and green pixelated flows of undercooked CGI renderings of either moving water or snot trickle down the sides. Visually, it's the Internet weirdness plethora we've come to expect in this day and age, but the mix thankfully deviates somewhat, going from a remix of Vapourspace's "Driving Blind" to diva house to Houston psychedelic rock group Red Krayola's "An Old Man's Dream."

The mixes, as Stttr's comment implies, hail from a variety of places and producers, including no one's favorite paisley-scarf-as-veil-tucked-under-snapback man o F F Love (recipient of that Pitchfork review where the dude wrote "its ugliness and pessimism exhaust me," because, well, OK dude), and MagicoToDisco of The Weekend (≠ The Weeknd), who contributed this "moody and mellow mix" of Korean sap singer songwriter stuff that's perhaps only matched in browsing-in-a-drugstore vibes by Hennessy Youngman's CVS Bangers mixes.

Even better is the faux samba of "The Secret Garden" mix by the Strawberry Sex, which has a pretty decent Urban Dictionary entry. Konyagatana's "Demi Mix" goes through rap and R&B of recent memory—that kind of grey area of tracks released over the last year or two, where you know you're supposed to get up on the newest thing but really all you want to do is listen to "Can't Do Golds"—and then goes to some sort of vaguely Jersey club remix of the "Thong Song" (39:30). And their most recent mix, "Childhood Soundtrack" by Montreal's Ramzi, hits those experimental German electronics/minimalist composer spots via Cluster, Terry Riley, and Aphex Twin.

Just as the Tumblr rotates loosely around Kevin Bacon as a concept, the mixes (and the visuals and the clothes but maybe not the texts) revolve in a circumscribed orbit around what's come to be expected from Facebook notifications and Soundcloud feeds. It's a pleasant, if slight, deviation from whatever metal-on-metal sound packs have been circulating the Abletons of the '89+ crowd. Of course, not only do we live in peak bacon times, but probably peak Jogging bait and peak Hypebeast fuccboi, so it made sense that Stttr seemed to think they'd move away from being so internet.

"We like Internet art. That's how we started and we have been doing this way, but maybe we're getting a little bit bored with this style. I think it's the changing phase now. We are trying to be creative, however, we never want to be productive or do or make anything valuable. In this way… we are really Internet people." I imagine that they'll eventually find their Bacon obsession gauche because the Brat Pack is nothing if not 90s-era catnip in our current moment in the cultural cycle. And I wish them nothing but success in their next endeavor, but part of me hopes that in 2038, when we're not even able to remember the joyous smell of bacon in a cast-iron, an 80-year-old Kevin Bacon will still be carefully catalogued by a crack team of Japanese DJs/Kevin Bacon archivists. Bacon Index forever.