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Here’s the video that first introduced me to downy. It came like manna from heaven at a time when I was at a dead end in my exploration of Japanese music.
The Japanese music industry has a whole lot in common with the American music industry; in fact, it’s probably a glimpse of the American Industry’s near future state: A behemoth of advertising, mass production, formulaic repetition, and blatant revenue creation. Years ago I used to hear it rumored that the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync etc. were creations of record companies, more or less genetically designed to make the most money from the least effort by pandering to a demographic with sparse discernment and extremely liquid assets. Well, often the Japanese industry doesn’t even pretend to hide it, and no one seems to mind.
Take Johhny’s, for instance. It’s more or less a boy band factory. It scouts members based on personal magnetism and charm, and then puts them through boy-band-bootcamp to learn how to dance, and hopefully at least marginally, to sing. Johhny’s does this successfully over and over and over, people keep buying the records, and they end up #1 on the charts. Also, basically each member in one of these groups is guaranteed a starring role in at least one tv drama, product endorsement deals, and various variety/gameshow appearances, and in fact, most groups actually get their very own TV show.
Not that any of this is intrinsically bad, it just gets old after a while. One can, perhaps, only take so much of the same sound, same routine. Thank goodness for downy, my first taste of life after so long having wandered in the aural wasteland.
Listen, listen again, then let go and really hear.
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Chicken Rice is a Chinese band that sounds very much like a Google searchbot’s nightmare, as well as a sort of happy house mix-platter of rockapsychobilly with a side of punky jam-laced blues.
The whole song is a bizarro 50’s steam engine ride. The verse chugs uphill steady and building, leaning back and looking ahead to the peak of the mountain when the chorus will plunge over the edge in bursts of steam and whistle blast. Heads and arms exit windows, plowing thick fog and rushing wind, carried along on this crazy one-way night-train to party town.
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|Mp3s][Website]
This was the first song on a mix CD I gave people for christmas last year. It strikes me as a sort of an apocalyptic epiphany, of waking up into a new reality.
The beginning thaws from complete silence into a glowing hum of gentle awakening. It’s comfortable like being born full grown into a world of warmth and soft white and yellow light and texture. Our world is repose and stillness. Gradually we awake, developing quickly, and soon become curious about the world outside of our opalescent shell. We rise and stretch, and peek around a corner to find an earthen alleyway. We wander out in safety and solitude, but turning another corner we find our niche opens onto a larger public thoroughfare. Stepping out cautiously, we begin to be pulled along by the current of traffic and civilization, beginning to understand the structures and patterns of industry and society. These exciting moments suddenly dampen and blur as we come upon the city’s central monolith. Awe-striking structures rise into boiling storm clouds approaching the city.
We pause, gazing, and time seems to stand still. Apprehension and uncertainty occur to us for the first time. Why are we standing here? Is something out of place? Something wrong? There’s something uneasy about this sudden unexpected silence of mind. And then with a sudden sickening, sinking feeling comes the realization that things are not as they seem; not at all as we know them to be.
Facades and forms start to melt and peel away, bubbling off of every sight and surface. Unfathomable strangeness is unrelentingly revealed wherever we turn our now frantic gaze. The world we knew rushes into and through the streets in streams of flowing ichor, away from us and down into gutters and channels unperceived. A painfully sparkling sharp and crystalline world emerges from our old understanding. It burns into the mind the utter fallacy of trying to understand it. In the end we must succumb to complete abandon, relinquishing the concept of self and existence. We revel in the perfection of chaos in the final instant, and are pulled into slumber once again.
This of course, sounds awkward and indulgently ridiculous… but it’s something like the impression that this song gives me, whether or not it makes any sense.
Kayo Dot, in any case, deserves your attention. Simply stated: they make brilliant and fascinating music, fluid, varied, and inspired. It most certainly deserves to be bought!
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I guess that contest is a bit of a tall order, so I’ll just put a link on the sidebar and keep on trucking. Here is a video from the man whose handiwork is the prize for the contest below. He animates his various videos personally, and even some for other bands.
The least I can say is that they are pretty clearly not inspired by a life of austere sobriety, and also that they are pretty clearly pretty.
In other news, I took down the ads for the time being because ads sorta suck, and at the current rate I am going it will take about 5 years of ads to pay off one year of hosting, so the choice seems clear.
Super busy as usual, but I’m thinking of posting a series of more “edgy” stuff, meaning noisier and rougher around the edges in general. We’ll see how that goes.
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I have been meaning for a while to come up with some interesting interview questions to submit to bands, finding the traditional gamut of queries to be rather dull and moth-eaten so to speak:
So the object of this contest is to come up with a list of interesting interview questions that I will try to submit to various bands/artists that I post about.
The questions can be eclectic, eccentric, or bizarre, but they should be thoughtful and creative, not just silly or random. The real goal of the questions themselves should be to provoke and elicit emotional and thoughtful replies from people instead of lists, like in the case of: “What are your favorite bands/movies/artists/etc.” or bland historical facts as in: “how old were you guys when you first met”.
I want as much as possible to cull the possibility of automatic, trite, or memorized responses, and instead try to give no escape to those interviewed except through genuine introspection and/or creative improvisation. Since these interviews will be conducted electronically for the most part, they will have time to think about their answers without the pressure of an immediate response.
So here are the basic requirements:
And everything else is up to you. This contest will go on as long as it has to, but I will tentatively set the end date as October 1st, 2006. If I haven’t found enough by that time I will extend the contest. Send as many questions as you like, ask your friends and lovers for ideas, ask a hobo, the more the merrier (especially since I don’t have a ton of visitors), but don’t just crank out quantity over quality; remember, these should be difficult but interesting to answer.
Whoever sends the most questions that make it into the final list wins the contest and shall receive Sub Pop Records promo-pack of: Chad VanGaalen‘s album Skelliconnection, a Sub Pop sampler with actually a lot of good songs, a few stickers, and a Chad VanGaalen button (all pictured above). If by some unforeseen happenstance this is not your idea of a party, fear not! The REAL reward will be discovering how various artists and musicians from all over the world will answer YOUR marvelous and fascinating questions!
Everyone is a winner. Let’s go! ????~~~~~?
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|Itunes Mp3s][Website]
The voice here is from the ghost of a baby bird, and the music is her afterlife-song about a dimly-recalled tragedy of life. To be fair though, she doesn’t remember it as tragic. In fact, with the haziness of the ethereal curtain it seems almost a blissful memory. The earth was giant golden waves of grain, and the sky a brilliant burst of indigo. There was warmth and comfort and a gentle slide into oblivion. Soon everything melts together in a glowing orange hum.
Now she goes around to other ghosts to tell them that there is another world out there, of indescribable beauty, maybe someday they will be able to see it.
Kaki King is apparently rather famous, if appearing on Letterman or Conan is a measure of anything, but I’m slow ok. One thing you should notice when you listen to this song and then watch those videos is that they are completely different. In the videos she is a virtuoso knife-fighter, amazing to watch and completely untouchable. In the song, she’s reaching out with worn and wizened hands to explain to you what she’s learned in her whirlwind fighting career.
I very much enjoy her previous albums for impressive guitaristry and sense of melodic beauty, but the new album: “…Until We Felt Red” is what you might call a horse of a different color. For one thing, there are other instruments in this cd, and a sense of experimental composition that even verges on postrockishness at points. It feels like she is satisfied with the heights she has attained, and can now feel free to relax and make things that interest her currently. For another thing, there is occasional singing which is the last clue that she is moving from technical to personal.
Overall I recommend all of her albums if you like any of this. Check out more videos on youtube, listen to the songs on herspace (especially the song “until we felt red”), and then buy everything! It’s all quality in my opinion.
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Since I’ve never been surfing I can imagine The Great Rollingflower is like riding a smooth blue, crystal-clear wave that never ends. Well eventually it ends, but not with a mouthful of saltwater; and it probably won’t give you much of a tan either.
This song undulates like a wave though, like a series of waves really, peaks and troughs. It seems to work particularly well if you aren’t concentrating on it, seeping like salt air into your surroundings.
You will also find quite a few mp3s from live jam sessions on their website.
Welcome to the Red Ruin blog archive. Through this site we wanted to share our discoveries with you. It isn't currently being updated, but someday that may change. We still monitor comments and emails, so feel free to participate.
The main purpose of this site was to facilitate the awareness and exposure of foreign music, art, cinema, and culture to a global audience. Through exposure, the artists will hopefully accumulate fans in places they couldn't have reached before, which will inevitably benefit them financially. However, if you are the copyright owner of any material displayed on this site, and wish it removed: Please contact me, and it will be done post-haste.
