Thursday 24 July 2008

Field Recordings 1 - The Namboku Line

Yeah, I know - daily my ass. Still I kinda had a reason, well a couple of reasons and one was trying to teach myself the internet again. God it's wonderful the stuff you can do, but actually doing it requires apparently more than just making gooey eyes at your computer. You actually have to frickin work at the damn thing, and the more crap accumulates on the internet, the more you have to dig through it to find someone talking sense.

Anyway, hopefully I'm on now, and hopefully this'll work. It might seem banal to the point of narcolepsy, but I'm pretty sure some people will get a kick out of it. I'm going to start recording 10 minute bursts of Japan and posting them here as streams and MP3s to download. It'll be places, events, things like that and will I figure be a little different to just looking at pictures.

To start with, something really basic, the underground train I get whenever I go into town. I live on the last stop of the North - South Namboku Line, and here's the ten minutes it takes to get all the way into Odori, the centre of town.



If blip.tv is as great as it says it is, you should be able to download it here:
The Namboku Line

edit 29th August: and now available to download here at archive.org, because blip.tv wasn't as great as it said it was. Here's the Internet Archive full page too.

Get off at 2:30 for the Best Denki superstore, a pornographic video store, and Yuka's appartment. Get off at 4:30 for a load of bars, restaurants and shops, and Matt & Ben. Get off at 6 minutes for the North side of Hokkaido University campus, and get off at 7:30 for the centre of campus. Get off at 9 minutes for Sapporo Station, you're in the city centre and you can go to the cinema, or go shopping, or catch another train from here. Finally stay on until the end for Odori, where all the big shops and department stores are.

2 comments:

  1. next time please do some commentary to go with it.

    something like, ".. and a man in a navy suit with a face like a two-day old balloon has just walked on through the automatic doors. now he is reading the newspaper, holding far too tightly to the overhead handle as if he has some unresolved anger issues from his younger days that continue to dog him even now.... "

    and so forth.

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  2. A whole new world of possibilities just opened up. Is it cheating if I take notes and overdub the voice over later? Do I have to walk around the city mumbling into my recorder like the worlds worst spy?

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