Tokyo Blog

Musical interlude from BOC. The idea is with these posts is that you just click play and you have something to listen to while you read.

Tokyo rapper Chinza Dopeness’ unique style is new to my ears, but I’m going to get the album as a result of listening to this. Via Shane Lester’s Vimeo.

This is pretty goofy, but it’s a remix of the Family Mart jingle that you usually hear when you walk into one of their convenience stores. The guy’s pretty hot with the Korg too. The cheesy techno it descends into would usually be a turn off, but in this situation it suits the chimes perfectly! People in Tokyo will definitely recoginse it.

Musical Interlude. I couldn’t find any videos worthy of showcasing the fine electronic music produced by Susumu Yokota, so I made my own. The track is Azukiiro No Kaori by Susumu Yokota from his Sakura album. All of the footage was shot Autumn/Winter 2008 and Autumn 2009.

This is another musical interlude. No footage to speak of here, just Aphex Twin’s sublime remix of The Gentle People’s track ‘The Journey’. This track can be found on the 26 Mixes for Cash compilation by Aphex Twin on WARP.

Not only do WARP Records have a new site up, they are also celebrating 20 years of unparalleled excellence as a creative organisation in the form of WARP20. Possibly the only one of it’s kind to combine recording artists, video artists, directors, and visual design under one banner, the organisation from Sheffield UK is holding a series of events and is releasing a beautifully designed box-set of the cream of it’s back-catalogue. The Paris event was held in May, and there will be further events this year in New York, Sheffield, Tokyo and London. The Tokyo event will be held at Makuhari Messe and will feature live performances by Battles, Chris Cunningham, !!! (chk chk chk), Clark, Flying Lotus and others. I’m a big fan of WARP, so I’ll definitely be there. Shame there’s no Aphex Twin though.

Hold onto your hats, this is quite unbelievable. Some guys, who I think are German, have been able to put together an audio production environment that runs in your browser, called Audiotool. It obviously uses Flash, but I don’t know how this is possible! There doesn’t seem to be a sequencer, so it can’t really claim to give Reason a run for its money, but the visuals and the interaction design are pretty stunning. A nice tool to use to play with sounds, but not for finished tracks. Have fun, but remember to do some work!

The beauty continues, this time in the form of another musical interlude. I give you Radiohead’s Epic, ‘All I Need’ with edited footage from the 1996 French nature documentary film ‘Microcosmos’.

Summer Sonic takes place this year in Tokyo, and on the bill is none other than my childhood hero Aphex Twin. I still think he’s one of the most enigmatic and uncompromising creatives in modern history. He never made anything for his fans or critics, only for himself, and thus his sound is pretty inaccessible, but I listen to it from time to time. Helps me think.

Tickets are a rip-off as usual, but if you want to see a truly rare performance from an artist responsible for shaping electronic music as we know it, break out your wallet.

6955 // Blip Festival 2007: The Videos from 2 Player Productions on Vimeo.

This musical interlude is from an old 6955 (Jason DeGroot of Polytron) performance. It’s a remixed version of the title theme for the long-awaited indy game title Fez. Jason used to be based in Tokyo and here he’s wearing a King of Games hoodie he must have picked up here - featuring Zelda.

The Blue Hearts bursting out of the Shinjuku live houses and onto prime time TV in the 1980’s. I especially like the VHS tape glitches before they play.

This is a Japanese kid, featured also on Japanese TV, who wants to challenge the wildcard spot in the YouTube beatbox champs - and he think he just might do it. He’s even better than the godfather of noise: Rahzel!

Another musical interlude for you now, through which you can savour a slice of Japanese pop culture at its finest. This is the beautifully named Toastgirl who, if you visit her site, you can see using vacuum cleaners as rollerskates and so on. Most of her music videos, like this one for a song I’m not sure of the name of, feature her riding a piece of toast or sometimes toasting bread in a toaster she has mounted on top of her head (maybe the song is called Skip Edit No.2, I can’t be sure. She’s really underground and hard to dig up info on). Enjoy this.

Happy Up Here from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

The norwegian electronic music duo Röyksopp have a new video directed by Rueben Sutherland. It involves pieces of a city coming together and arraying like pixels to form a game of space invaders in the night sky. Sweet.

Beck “Gameboy Homeboy” from wyldfile on Vimeo.

Wylde File have created an absolutely insane, bad acid trip promo video for the 8-bit inspired remixes from Beck’s recent(ish) album Guero. This is intense!