Kon-Rock Night featuring Nipponia Electronica

So continuing from that logically impossible post yesterday, last night I went to see a great electronic/VJ night at Design Furniture Store Agra. At night, in the pouring rain, Agra felt exactly nothing like a furniture store, and exactly like an after hours warehouse show in a somewhat shady, anonymous concrete building. It seemed to be in an obscure location, and almost invisible from the road so that we pretty much drove past trying to find it. Inside the shop was mostly closed off and there was a plain white room that I reckon they use for shows quite a lot. Especially since they have a purpose built bar... which is, I feel, a tad unusual for a furniture store. Being a furniture store there were chairs, branded with the shops name, and a variety of cool looking tables absolutely covered in a positively terrifying arsenal of electronic devices. It certainly reminded me that I really want an Yamaha Tenori-On. Oh sweet gadgetry...

The first guy up as we walked in was Kimitaka Matsumae, who put on a virtuoso set of keyboard wizardry that reminded me in the best way of the music from classic video games of the early nineties. I love that shit, so I was in hog heaven. The second guy put the night on I think, but I only realised this later, so I felt a little guilty for spending most of his set outside. He played under the name Invisible Future, and he had a fun show, blending electro music, specially made videos and J-Pop style vocals with a lot of charm. However, it was pouring with rain, it was not a cold night, and the room was completely unventilated so it was hot as - yes - balls. I took the chance to step outside.


The main reason we went was Nipponia Electronica, who Yuka and Katsuhiko know, and who's work I'd already been blown away buy. Nipponia-san blends electronic music and video composition in a way that's more fun, fluid and impressive than almost anyone else I've seen. He cuts, loops and scratches footage from old Japanese TV shows, and adds his own music to create an astounding spectacle that is both audio and visual. How d'you like them apples? During his set he used pre-prepared tracks that he added to, mixed and manipulated (with, amongst other things, a Kaoss Pad, and the afformentioned Tenori-On, swoon) and most impressively he used one of those incredible DVD scratching devices to perform video scratch solos. Seriously, that shit alone is worth the price of entrance. I got given a free DVD too with samples of all the artists work so if I can find a way to rip his track off it I feel like I've got a duty to the world to share it.

Because of course, this guy, awesome though he is, is never gonna make it big. His entire art depends on repurposing otherwise unremarkable moments of ancient TV, and there is no way in hell he could clear all the copyrights. So he plays these tiny nights, probably makes no money, and is an absolute genius.

The night ended with a four-man electronic jam that worked far better than it had any right to. I'm pretty damn glad I decided to go really.

Alex's Saturday Night

No post tonight because I went out to see an awesome electronic music and video art show at a furniture store (more on that tomorrow).

Later I met up with some other people who asked what I'd been up to. I told them the above and Matt said, "yup, that sounds like you."

Which is telling, huh?

After that I hadn't eaten, so we went to Aji no Tokeidai - "Taste of the Clocktower" as I like to slightly mistranslate it, for ramen and saw the most astounding pair of shoes... ON... THIS... EARTH. What can you do if you want to wear ridiculous, effette, hipster cowboy boots but... sheesh... it's just too goshdarned hot for anything but sandals in the summer?

Let's just say someone has solved that little conundrum, but it's not something we should be thankful for.

Let's just call this Zazen Boys week shall we?

This is what happens when you put love out there - you get love back. Even the crazy Tower Records guy camped outside my appartment know this, but it's not getting him anywhere yet. Chris emailed me that the NME featured a bunch of live Zazen Boys clips from when they were recording their album in New York with Dave Fridmann. Wonderfully, they played a free show at a nearby bar and so now I (and, by extension, you) can watch them kicking the crap out of a bunch of people who have no idea who they are. It comes in seven chunks, I'll link to part 2 here because it's Himitsu Girl's Top Secret which is awesome, but I strongly recommend you check out the whole thing, especially part 3, which is Daruma, the best track on their last single and awesomely you can hear someone yelling "Freebird!" just before it starts. Also part 5, Cold Beat is phenomenal:

St. Vincent

Apparently it's my job this week to make some quick posts about awesome music. Yeah, me and twenty thousand other internet goons, but I don't make the rules man, I just... concede.

Tower Records still exists in Japan you know. It went bust in America and Europe but in Japan - still going strong and a huge part of the music industry here. They sponsor pretty much everything that has anything to do with music. The saturation of their "No Music, No Life" slogan is like a case study in memetics. There's a guy right outside my appartment right now waving one of those stupid yellow hand-towels and chanting his ass off. I'd close my window but for some reason we're getting a second summer in Hokkaido and it's hot as balls.

However while they've got the best stock of import CDs, I don't really head to Tower for anything except the latest western releases. I'm glad I popped in this weekend looking for the new Vast Aire album though (no luck there). They were having a clearout of tons of western CDs that hadn't sold, so I could pick up a few things I forgot about at half price. And one of those CDs was Marry Me by St. Vincent.

Here's is my review: "It's awesome", now less yapping and more watching the awesome music video:

Wow! But in Japan they don't say music video, they say PV, standing for "Promotional Video" isn't that interesting? Yeah, I know. You're welcome. Again.

Zazen Boys

The new Zazen Boys album (produced by Dave Fridmann interestingly enough) comes out on the 17th September! Hot damn I'm excited, and even though I'm pretty sure it's not gonna match up to their previous records, at least they're taking their sound on some kind of geek odyssey into the heart of 1980s hedonism. Their new video is also awesome:

Field Recordings 2 - Sapporo Beer Garden 2008

So in serious news Prime Minister Fukuda resigned suddenly yesterday. I spoke to a few people, and from what I can tell it seems that no-one expected it, and although he was pretty unpopular, people don't like the fact that he just quit like that, it feels kinda like he... left the country in the lurch? Something like that. Some people are pretty happy though, I'm sure. It was a real shock especially since he reshuffled his cabinet last month, but Abe quit after a similarly positive move...

Anyway, y'know what doesn't bring in the hits? POLITICS. Y'know what does? BEER! At least that's what I'm banking on with this, my second field recording, taken at Sapporo's crazy drinking festival Beer Garden 2008! I'm sure I wrote about this a lot already, but Beer Garden is a huge sprawling outdoor beer drinking extravaganza across Odori Park for about a month every summer. I went down on the first night, and between getting pretty much tanked, I walked the whole length, from the German Beer Garden to the Suntory Premium Malts Garden clutching a digital recorder as I went.



It's 15 minutes long, so the 192kbps version is a pretty hefty 21 megs. Still you can download it right here, and the main Internet Archive page for it in different sizes and formats is here.

And here are the notes:

00.00 - It starts off with Japanese people singing German beer songs around West 9 or 10, the German Beer Garden. At this end things were pretty calm and restrained, people sitting around and enjoying the music and the beer.

Between here and 06.00 I was walking past the International Beer Garden (I don't remember which brands) which seems to have been deadly quiet, and the area of grass and slides where parents had left their children to fend for themselves while they went off to get trolleyed. I'm KIDDING!

06.00 - Sapporo Beer Garden. The home brand patch was packed, and looked something like this:


But it wasn't all that crazy.

08.00 - The Kirin Beer Garden on the other hand was off the hook. Hear someone dropping something! A bunch of tanked guys jumping up and down screaming "NUMBER ONE!" Crowd pleasing sing along numbers! This was actually where my friends were sitting - conversation was difficult...


11.00 Asahi Beer Garden was less crazy, but still a pretty big party. They had the big bandstand as a stage so they could easily entertain the crowd, it was packed:


13.00 - After that we hike on to the last garden, Suntory: The Premium Malts Garden. This place was pretty cool, but not exactly as "pumping" as Asahi or Kirin.

There you go, now you just need to go get drunk and spend 15 minutes listening to that on your ipod while you walk though a balmy summer evening and you might as well have been there yourself.

I'm too good to you.

Leonard Foujita

Man, I love it when I got into a coffee shop, order a coffee, and while I'm sitting drinking that coffee, they bring me more coffee for free. That's the kinda thing that'll make you love a place, and they've done that three times now when I've been in the Japanese coffee chain Tully's in Odori. On one level Tully's is just another chain coffee store, but their coffee is better than Starbucks, and I find it much less objectionable going there when I'm in one of the big shopping areas. Plus, y'know, free coffee.

This weekend I went to see the Leonard Foujita retrospective at Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art. I love modern art, and I love art galleries, but with the best will in the world Sapporo is not well served for them. Oh well, I guess the general awesomeness makes up for it.


Foujita seems to have been a prolific and interesting artist. He moved from Japan to France in the 20s and hung out with Modigliani (I would say, with my professional art-critic's gaze, that the examples of his early work here did look like Modigliani) and became an established and respected figure in the European art community. He later travelled all over the world, married several times, and at some point changed his name to Leonard and converted to Christianity.

From a quick browse on the web it looks like Foujita painted many, many pictures, and moved through quite a few phases in his career which made the retrospective very interesting, even if at times I plain didn't like his paintings. The exhibition's centrepiece was a massive piece recently discovered and restored from his... I guess middle period. It's a fun story, it was considered lost for many years but found in a Paris warehouse and restored. However that period, and earlier in what seems to have been the period when he made his name... really not to my tastes:


I am unmoved by the pearlescent luminosity of their skin. There was one mural that I felt was really pretty terrible. However the earlier pictures when he was finding his way were interesting, and he seems to have painted the only interesting pictures of cats I've ever seen. Paintings of cats are usually a pet hate of mine, but these were great. And later in his career I would say he was a hell of a painter no matter what your tastes, his faces became deliberately stylised in a really interesting way, and he started using these eerie children that look both fully-formed and painted from memory at the same time. His paintings started exploding with colour and he really started pursuing his Christian faith through painting, decorating a chapel and making paintings of the adoration, the apocalypse, the descent from the cross and so on.

It's great to see an artist's career like this, and considering I couldn't read any of the information boards (which were helpfully in Japanese and French) it all came across pretty clearly. I didn't know anything about him before, but I'd recommend the exhibition if you can make it to Sapporo Japan before it finishes on... um... Thursday.