I see I haven’t been doing much of the “Exploring the world through sight…” part of our title. So here is some very interesting slice-of-life photography of daily situations in various parts of China complete with captions.

I don’t know about you, but I often get the feeling that we humans experience the world too much through simple recognition and not enough through conscious reflection. Which is to say that every time we see or hear about something that is far enough removed from our daily experience, for example foreign countries or cultures that happen to be thousands of miles away, the information gets cross-referenced against a subconscious database of shallow tidbits –possibly simply a few cliché mental images– which is just enough to provide a basic frame of reference that is suitable for understanding the conversation and moving on.

The problem seems to me to be that without some kind of external impetus or revelation many of us may always see these people and their situations as hazy unrealistic caricatures of reality; and remain unable to sympathize with them or identify with their hardships. When we hear about Asia’s struggle for energy and industrial growth we may simply think of the whole continent as an Asia-shaped piece in an economics board game and forget the human element entirely.

In other words, I think images like these can help inspire us to reflect upon what it means that there are real people out there living these lives today.

The world is an interesting and dynamic place. It’s just hard sometimes to see it past the daily grind, to mentally disembark from our domestic slumber.

[Part 1: Survival][Part 2: Relationships][Part 3: Desires]

Well, happy holidays and new year to everyone. I’ve been using some of my spare time to work on making a new video player that will have a lot of good functionality built in. For example it has a playlist to support multiple videos, and you will be able to copy link code and embed code very easily in order to paste it onto your blog/myspace/website/email/im/whatever in order to share our videos with a wider audience. It even has full-screen mode!

I expect it will be completed in the next month or so, but in case there is anyone reading this who is proficient in Actionscript 2, I would love to get some advice regarding problems I’m having that seem to have no good solution that I can find.

Anyway, here’s looking forward to new developments!

Artist: World’s End Boyfriend
Song: Planetarium Ghost Train
From album: Christmas Song (Xmas Song)[?????????]
[Buy CD][Discography]

Here’s a slightly tardy and amorphously seasonal sounding song for the holidays from a record of decidedly seasonal title. It is the work of Katsuhiko Maeda, whose World’s End Girlfriend project we featured a year ago this month.

Most of the songs on this record seem quite lighthearted in comparison to WEG, though in a characteristically twisted way. It’s something like Christmas-Meets-Halloween the musical, as interpreted by glitchy haunted computer children.

I had the good fortune last year to catch a show featuring both World’s End Girlfriend and Mono on extremely late notice and to find a nice spot next to the speaker stack in the front for the whole thing. While Mono has a well-deserved reputation for their intense live show, I hadn’t heard anything at all about WEG’s. And though I must say that I was hoping to find him with the full band that he had in one of the videos from our previous post, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that his solo performance was comparably powerful at the very least.

An overwhelming amount of sound can come out of this guy and his guitar and the machines that surround him in a nest of wires.

Artist: Cowboys Fringants
Song: L’Hiver Approche (Winter Approaches)
From album: Break Syndical
Genre: Québécois néo-trad
[Buy CD][Website][Lyrics]

I write this while watching the first snow of the year and remembering by it the long lost friend who recommended to me these very Cowboys Fringants toward the beginning of my music exploration life.

He lived in one of the tiny seaside villages in Quebec that mark the northern end of civilization and paved roads, and suggested the warmth of the “Frisky Cowboys” while speaking of sidewalks lined by ten foot high walls of snow.

It would be easy to imagine the song “L’Hiver Approche” as the beginning to an evening of dancing and drinking in a log-cabin pub, kindling a glow in icy windows that could be seen for winter miles and drawing villagers in from the cold. Don’t you think? Well imagine my surprise when I subjected the lyrics to online translation and discovered a raw social critique of consumerism and proletarian drudgery. Perhaps the song is even more timely than I thought.

I edited together an English translation of the French lyrics from 3 different translator programs with a little grammatical license, and it should give you the basic idea.

Happy Christmas Shopping!

Artist: The Antlers
Song: East River Berlin Wall
From album: Cold War (EP)
[Buy other Album|mp3s][Website][Myspace]

This wisp of a song is to waking up on a cold dark morning what Hermit was to waking up on an all too sunny one. It’s a long and longing corner window stare; drained of momentum by an ice-covered outlook and one’s own frozen breath.

The Antlers is the work of Peter Silberman of Manhattan, and you can download other Antlers songs (including the rest of this EP) here, and read them here.

Artist: School Food Punishment
Song: Close,Down,Back to
From album: School Food is Good Food
[Buy CD][Website]

School Food Punishment, besides being a name that conjures amusing memories, is a Japanese group that makes some pretty catchy pop. Most of the songs from their first full album School Food is Good Food, which was released earlier this year, fit pretty well into my conceptions of the genre. You have your clean female vocals, with a timbre perhaps a little dramatic, over harmless upbeat/dancy, or sentimental backing music framed in a tried and true song structure. Though they may have some rock in their blood, it’s definitely not out in front.

Then somehow this song sneaks into the album, (in the very beginning of it I might add) and alienates all the other songs by bringing with it a soundtrack like a floating electro barge of doom which carries off its amazonian vocal rider in a storm of arcing electricity. It’s urgent and driving, and unexpected.

Maybe it’s the exertion of the first song that tires out the rest of the album for me, but fans of the major pop acts should still find a lot to like in this quirky newcomer. They also have a new album coming out… tomorrow, so we won’t have to wait long to see what direction they are heading.

Artist: Toddle
Song: Colonnade
From album: Dawn Praise the World
[Buy CD| mp3s][Website]

With Dawn Praise the World Toddle has taken a significant step forward as a band. While their first record I Dedicate D Chord was strongly regarded, to me there seemed to be a slightly distracting gap sometimes, between the bare unprocessed vocals of front-woman Tabuchi Hisako and the rest of the band.

Tabuchi herself is a creative dynamo, and with a momentous musical history in the seminal bands Number Girl and Bloodthirsty Butchers in her pocket, she is now plowing her very own path to prominence.

Dawn Praise the World shows us that the last album was no accident, and in between the two releases the flavours have mingled and blended into a riper and more accessible product. The gaps are gone, in their place are layers of softened vocals that embrace the contours of the music without a hint of hesitation and carry it off with determined energy. It feels like she now has a much fuller possession of her musical vision and has taken charge of the effort.

Dawn is a confident and enjoyable album and a milestone in Toddle’s career; and if the past is any measure, the future looks bright for Tabuchi Hisako.

Artist: Dir en Grey
Song: Dozing Green
From album: Dozing Green
[Buy CD][Website]

I saw this video recently and found it appropriate for the Halloween season as apparently did they, choosing late October for the single‘s release.

This is one of the bands one finds everywhere when one first starts investigating Japanese music, along with a host of other familiar names, most of which fall into the genre of Visual Kei (VK), and most of which you will probably never find on this site. Though on principle I hold nothing against VK, it is in general a genre more about fashion and presence and showmanship than creativity in music. In particular the singing style is very recognizable, and sometimes nearly identical between bands.

That said, I can still appreciate an occasional morsel of Dir en Grey on a couple of levels. They have a certain subset of songs that can stand on their own merits for me, with enjoyably intense building and breaking vocal melodies. Their music videos are almost always visually interesting, controversial, and bizarre. And though most of the disturbed shock aesthetic in the genre seems to be rather transparent, Dir en Grey’s widely revered frontman Kyo is indisputably a pioneer in that vein and is apparently far more serious about it than most. An observation that is supported by many accounts (like Ian’s) of their live shows.