December 05, 2006
Vertigo, and ringing ears
Never would I have thought that it was possible to spend an interesting Monday night in Saitama, but U2 obligingly proved me wrong. The entire evening was sheer euphoria and I have close to zero critical distance on it, so let me say only that (a) they're making a hell of a racket for four guys banging and spanking bits of wood with not much backup save the usual FX boxes and a colossal amount of amplification, and (b) it's quite a feat to make songs sound personal to an audience of close to 40,000 people, but for me at least they pull it off.
Inviting three maiko on stage for "Mysterious Ways" was a questionable move, though (I'm not sure if they were real; they looked awfully uncomfortable, but then, who wouldn't have in their position?).
July 31, 2006
July 27, 2006
May 24, 2006
Elektron Monomachine in the garage
After obsessing over the Elektron Monomachine recently, a sizeable tax refund from last year came through and I took the plunge. It's not an easy thing to get hold of in Japan, and I ended up corresponding with the CEO (thanks, Daniel!) to try and figure out how to lay my hands on one and why it was taking so long. Turns out, for any prospective purchasers, that the importers need to fit a Japan-only adapter to handle the current--the US version won't work, so take care.
After half an hour or so of playing, I'm pretty pleased. The buttons are lighter and have a longer travel than I'm used to from this kind of kit and initially felt a bit flimsy, but in fact the light clickiness is reminiscent of a laptop keyboard, and allied with the incredibly well-thought-out layout makes it easy to touch-type when you're programming. The screen layout is just as good, dividing main parameters into two rows of four and matching them with eight knobs to the right of the screen.
Technorati Tags: gadgets, music
I've only scratched the surface of the synthesizers so far; particularly the vocal synth looks like it's going to take some getting used to, and (having only glanced at the manual a few times) there are some unfamiliar parameters in there. Particularly interesting is the filter, which seems to be infinitely variable between low/high/bandpass and possibly a few other things as well depending on how you tweak it; looks like it'll bear some investigating. One really great feature of the synths and sequencer is the parameter lock feature, though -- hold down the trigger key for the step you're programming and tweak whatever synth or effect settings you feel like, and they're locked in as part of that step. Makes adding variation to sounds very easy, and I sense I could well end up programming patterns on the Monomachine and pulling them into Ableton Live either as audio or MIDI later on.
The sounds themselves have a lot of oomph, and if you're pushing the phat button as you program the mix fills up very quickly. It encourages a stripped-down approach to arranging, given that the amount of sonic interest and richness you can pack into even a minimal set of parts is considerable.
In all, pretty impressed so far with my first Swedish-designed/Estonian-made synth.
May 18, 2006
Album review: Pet Shop Boys - Fundamental
If by some chance this is the first review of this album you've read, I can set all fears to rest at the outset: Release did not mark the beginning of the end, a last few years peppered with side projects such as Battleship Potemkin and a subsequent fade out. Nope. Fundamental is great.
It throws you a worrying curve to start with, though. "Psychological" is mid-paced, low-key and lyrically abstract, though it offers a welcome hint of past triumphs in its "One More Chance"-like shift in and out of minimalism and washes of colour. It does reveal more complexity with repeated plays, but it still sounds more like a B-side than an album opener.
Real reassurance begins with "The Sodom and Gomorrah Show". A blustering intro that hints at a PSB returned to effortless form drops out into near-silence, into which Tennant begins: "I lived a quiet life, a stranger to champagne/I never dared to venture out to cities of the plain". And you realise how much you've missed this. You feel like phoning friends and telling them.
The people who claim critics of Release are down on the album because of its guitar-heavy, nontraditional PSB sound, and that the electropop stormers that see something of a renaissance on Fundamental are a crutch on which they lean in times of trouble are, I think, missing the point. The two indispensables in a good PSB song are Tennant's lyrics--which, aside from "Home and Dry" and "London" hit a terrible low on Release--and a sense of effortlessness, for want of a better word. Release sounded like it had sand in its gearbox.
Another thing to note is that the return to a faster, more bombastic tone has been overstated; five of the album's eleven songs are ballads, and "Twentieth Century" is so gentle in execution that it's hard to group it with the "up" tunes. But there's a tautness even in the ballads that was in scant evidence in Release's plodding lineup.
The two particular standouts on the ballad front, incidentally, are probably "I Made My Excuses and Left" and "Casanova in Hell"; both are vignettes, the former a sketch of a single scene of betrayal, the latter a short story of an ageing Casanova achieving revenge for his failing potency in the bedroom by airbrushing the history to leave his priapic image unblemished.
There's a full rundown of the background to the songs here and an excellent three part review at Trembleclef that discusses the album far more extensively. Also, read an interview in the recent Sunday Times here.
May 08, 2006
Yellow Submarine!
Heard on the radio this morning: Kanazawa Akiko's 1982 Japanese-lyric version of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine. As the name (イエローサブマリン音頭) suggests, the style is the kind of thing you would expect to hear backing bon-odori during the summer. Begging the forgiveness of any enka connoisseurs in the audience, I'd sum it up as uncharacteristically cheerful enka underpinned by a steady dum dum dum, du-dum, du-dum that I assume emanates from a taiko of some form.Much of its greatness can be summed up in the lyrics from the end of the chorus:
ウィー・オール・リブ・イン・ア・イエロー・サブマリン
イエロー・サブマリン
潜水艦！アソーレ！
It's available to buy in Windows Media and some proprietary, DRMed Sony format here (more to the point, there's a link to preview it).
According to her Wikipedia entry Kanazawa has also graced the world with (amongst other things) at least one collection of nude photographs, released when she was 30, so it sounds like she's had quite an interesting time of it. The same entry notes that the serious Beatles fans in the house weren't all that pleased about her version of Yellow Submarine being released to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their heros' formation. Some people have no sense of fun.
April 20, 2006
The Elektron Monomachine: Synth lust
I'm a huge sucker for TB-303/Groovebox-type gadgets, and after switching over to using entirely software-based synthesizers (Reason, Ableton Live, plus a variety of plugins) I've been getting periodic cravings for something in a little box that I can tweak (put away your dirty minds).
I came across the Elektron Monomachine a while back and for some reason it didn't click, but recently the thing has become a minor obsession. First I saw a bright-red Roland SH-101 advertised on Yahoo!Japan Auctions and remembered how much I'd wanted one when I was about 15; then I ditched the nostalgia in favour of something that would actually work without breaking down, talk to other parts of the studio via MIDI, etc. Analogue synths are of course undergoing a huge renaissance both in software and, more recently, in hardware form, but nothing to my mind quite beats the Monomachine, which offers five different types of synthesis -- including analogue, FM, and a modelling of the Commodore 64's SID chip (the real item, insofar as Elektron can source them these days, forms the guts of one of their other offerings, the SIDStation).
The disadvantage? The price, of course. Y270,000 (1950 Euros, I believe) for the keyboard version, and about Y100,000/600 Euros less for the desktop, keyboardless unit.
[Read: Elektron Monomachine website]
April 15, 2006
PSB Stupid video
Further to my frothing over the new Pet Shop Boys single yesterday, the video is now available online as well. Avoid the PSB site, which at the moment is letting through the audio stream but almost no video, and head over to Popjustice instead.
The PSBs tend to make entertaining videos, and this is among the best; David Walliams and Matt Lucas forcing the tied-up PSBs to watch their school-play-awful Pet Shop Boys act in a scratty hall. The inept rehash of the Very-era pointy hats and costumes in see-all-the-wires, low-rent fashion is classic. If I were to make a criticism, it would be only that the video is so good that it almost makes you forget the song.
April 13, 2006
I'm with Stupid
I don't think that "I'm with Stupid" is the best thing the Pet Shop Boys have ever done, but I can't stop listening to it. (Click into the main page of their site and it plays in the background). Partly, it's because it sounds like something from the period Neil Tennant likes to refer to as their "Imperial phase"--around the time of albums like Actually and Introspective--where even B-sides like "Do I Have To?" and "I Get Excited" were worth playing over and over again and putting on your compilation tapes. They've kept Trevor Horn on a relatively tight rein this time--compared to "Left to My Own Devices", whose orchestration employed a cast of thousands and contained enough ideas to embarrass any five normal songs, it's positively restrained. But they've opted for the chunky bassline and chugging percussion that underpins some of their most confident moments--"Heart" comes to mind--plus the odd bombastic percussion fill that taps an ancestral line through the Pets to Propaganda, and pads and pulses to fill it out, and the overall effect is a poise and purpose that's been absent in recent years. Whether it's a renaissance to equal "Very", we'll have to wait for the album to tell; but a lead single that characterises Tony Blair and George W. Bush's relationship in terms of the uncertainties of a gay love affair suggests more confidence, humour and vigour than they've emanated for a while.
November 18, 2005
November 03, 2005
Tujiko Noriko - From Tokyo To Niagara
Not sure whether to buy this or not, but it sounds interesting based on a listen to a couple of tracks. Posting this by way of a bookmark.
August 05, 2005
Bleep.com
The launch of the iTunes Music Store in Japan yesterday put something into perspective; the fact that there is far more of interest, as far as I'm concerned, on bleep.com, which began as Warp Records' download site but seems to be adding more record labels and genres every time I visit. Now they have a "web tools" link for every album that allows you to set up a player on your site. This is to see what it looks like in a blog post. The track is by A Certain Ratio, who are sounding pretty fresh (perhaps more so than !!!, who sound somewhat like them on occasion).
July 05, 2005
The sound of tears
I'm not the first with this observation, but Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler's new venture, The Tears, have made a debut that sounds exactly like that third Suede album we never got because Butler walked out during the making of the second. Of course, you also have to wonder how Dog Man Star would have turned out had Butler stuck around to the end, but Here Come the Tears is plenty for now.
I've seen Suede play some of the stuff that followed the breakup live, heard it on the radio, and liked it well enough; but they lost something critical when Butler left, and Trash and Film Star prophesied their shift into something that was harsh and slogany, plastic and empty. They'd always been partly about flash and trash, of course; but it was a coating on songs that you could feel were about something that made sense to you: yearning, loss, embarrassment, awkwardness, preening, ambition, escape.
This album resets things to the pre-decline era, though Brett's lyric writing is only just recovering from years of neglect and Butler needs to let go of his tendency to multitrack everything to hell. Still, there's a fluidity to the best stuff here -- the savagery of the riffs of Brave New Century, the swagger of Lovers -- that makes you unthinkingly forgive the flaws and rejoice in the fact that two strong writers have given up pissing away their talent and started bottling it again.
The one thing they have to work on is the codas, something which made many a Suede song complete, but which are only half-remembered here. Fallen Idol is one of several tracks that bow out on a repeated vocal phrase (in this case, whistling -- best avoided) with a wash of noodling guitars under it, creating a feeling of aimless churning that has you pining for the effortless shift of gear that took songs like Metal Mickey or New Generation flying into riffed endings like a sweet rush of blood to the head.
At its best, this album is effortless and inevitable in the manner of Anderson and Butler's best. Next task is to get past the euphoria of this reunion and work on the real masterpieces that, we can but hope, lie ahead.
October 27, 2004
RIP John Peel
This is just awful. John Peel is dead at 65.
BBC NEWS: Tributes pour in for DJ John Peel
June 21, 2004
Chaku-uta test
Just seeing if QuickTime 6.5 really will output music as something I can download to my phone as a song ringtone: here
[Update: Works fine on my new Fujitsu F900iT. Obviously you need to find a compromise between bit rate, length and so forth to get what you want--192Kbps @ 48.0kHz for about 10-15 seconds gives a file of about 268kb, which is only just under the limit these phones can handle, and I suspect given the size of the speakers it'd be possible to take the quality down quite a bit and still get acceptable results. More experimenting to be done...]
[Update: Apparently there are all sorts of settings needed. DoCoMo couldn't just make it easy...let's tryhere]
February 19, 2004
My secret life as a recording artist
Micropayments company BitPass has opened a new music community site a la mp3.com, but focused on selling the content itself (i.e., the files) rather than pressing up CDs and all that malarkey. Their FAQ says it all about their attitude. They do not, in a nutshell, appear to be evil.
Have uploaded one song under my new alias, junai, which by the look of the URL is exactly their hundredth--do I win something?
Am also testing out BitPass on this site; the same song is available to buy here under pretty much the same conditions as at Mperia. Go on. Line my pockets.
(Looks like the above link may not work yet; awaiting activation.)