Artist: Takagi Masakatsu
Song: Girls
[Buy CDs/DVDs|itunes][Artist’s Site]

Found via “Film. Music. Philosophy.”, Takagi Masakatsu has instantly become one of my top favorite multimedia artists. He paints with video, over it, through it, around and into it. Watching his incredible moving paintings is like seeing into a world of true forms. In his world, everything is literally burning with life and color and emotional essence; the sky, the wind, everything. It’s all more real than one could imagine.

The miraculous movement and flow of his works is wrapped up in what he calls the missing color of sound; the expressive ambient musical compositions he writes for each piece. The song in this post is “girls” from his album “Coieda”.

Despite the Macsturbatory propaganda, the Apple Pro video piece on him is of a very good quality, and shows some excellent samples of his work. In this PopJam interview he talks a bit about his art, and there are several other nice clips, though at a much lower resolution. His own site has many many large stills from the works as well.

Simply put, this stuff is effing gorgeous. Links: [1][2][3][4][5]

Artist: Maps & Atlases
Song: Every Place is a House
From album: Tree, Swallows, Houses
Genre: Prodigy Taprock
[Buy CD $7.99|Mp3s][Website]

Maps & Atlases is what I might consider a very promising band, which I say probably because I like every one of their songs. There’s virtuoso guitar workmanship, creative melodic phrasing, unique vocal style, impeccable mathish and indieward sensibilities, a penchant for occasional employment of artful restraint, and all that other jargony blah blah.

What it boils down to is that they are consistently interesting; their songs are individual to an extent that hints at a large available reservoir of creativity. I’m definitely looking forward to more from these guys.

Also, you should listen to “The Ongoing Horrible” on their myspace page if you want to get an idea of the variety that they are capable of, even now in their first release.

Artist: zOoOoOm
Song: Rumble Bush
From album: Eight My Heart
Genre: Twitterfrolica
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

It seems that this song could have been recorded live over the course of a day, through the woods and streams of some sunny make-believe world. The sound crew would have followed the singer, this adorably frisky woodland nymphish creature, as she gallivanted and cavorted, cartwheeled and marched around her hilly countryside domain.

Sounds and words burst out spontaneously as little yelps and yells of discovery and curiosity, with occasional meandering musings on general jubilation. The overall result is a mood of frivolously innocent intensity and inescapable glow.

Artist: Hearts of Black Science
Song: Empty City Lights
From album: Promo 2006
Genre: “Pure Electro Gonzo”
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

This song reminds me of the feeling of waking up before sunrise. It’s a brisk autumn morning with a quick breakfast and an early start on a road trip in the imminent future. It’s a quiet inkling somewhere in your chest that there’s new excitement brewing.

You hit the road in the golden hour, and colors look more real than ever, as if the world was newly washed during the night. Falling leaves seem frozen with fire; everything drips with electricity and a feeling of anticipation tinged with melancholy. The wind whipping past you is cool and filled with abandon; and it floods the car with memories.

Hearts of Black Science is another good myspace find. The songs are lacquered with a restrained but deeply-present darkish sheen. It may be elusive at first glance, so you might have to look twice to see the true colors. Their influences range from Ladytron to Darkthrone, but what they come up with seems distinctly and un-self-consciously their own.

So basically Microsoft lost a lawsuit against a company called Eolas a long time ago; and now, unless you change your code and upload a certain script to your root directory, your Interactive Flash won’t work and will just look like a static image. Of course, if you hold your mouse over it for 2 seconds you’ll get a little “Click to activate and use this control” message, which effectively murders the convenience of the single click concept. This pleases me to no end, since it means I must change the code in every one of my music posts, and in doing so, manage to lose the review for Tokyo Police Club!

Apparently I missed the early warnings, so this issue seems to have only taken effect for me recently, like today? I have been able to use single clicks when checking in other browsers until recently. I did update Opera yesterday, so that might have kicked it in, but suddenly the problem is showing up in Firefox and IE as well, and on other computers, so I don’t know…

This is very excellent because it seems to mean that every piece of Flash and/or embedded media on the internet must be changed! The community is being brought together on a global scale by magnificent annoyance!

If you are having problems with embedded media doing this in your own sites, the following links have a few different fixes to the problem, which will allow you to configure your own content to bypass this little problem:

[“Quick and dirty” fix for “Click to activate and use this control” problem]
[Macromedia Flash Specific (and much more complicated) solution]
[Adobe article with another solution]

I used the first one, since WordPress apparently has issues with the Macromedia way, and the first solution is way easier anyway…
If you have any problems, just comment and let me know, and I’ll try to help you out.

Happy Fixing! (I’m not the only one having this issue right?!)

Artist: Tokyo Police Club
Song: Shoulders and Arms
From album: A Lesson in Crime
Genre: Indie Romp
[Buy CD from Insound|Mp3s][Website]

Sweet, I was trying to fix the site and I end up losing this whole post, and I forget what I wrote so for now the review= “These guys are pretty darn good, listen to their music, and support them monetarily if you think they deserve it.”

Yeesh…

Artist: Sparta Locals
Song: Boku wa Lion (??????)
From album: Dreamer
Genre: Gutrock
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website][Interview]

When I heard this song on Rock Sick I had to have it. Sparta Locals are a very well known band in Japanese indieish circles but somehow I never gave them a chance, filing them away in the “all sound the same” category. If I had heard this song first it would have been a different story altogether.

This song can stand alone completely on its own merit, and the chorus can stand alone in the song, and the vocals stand at the heart of it all. This is the kind of feeling that got me into genres ending in “core” in my youth. It’s powerful and forceful in the way that you can feel him pushing sound out with every muscle in his body; every cell is strained to the limit. It’s that utterness that inspires. At times it sounds like he’s putting parts of his life into it, condensing memories, and emotions, and breathing, and aching all at once, wrapping them around simple words, (i’m a lion) and heaving them with all his might into the atmosphere.

Artist: Dhal
Song: Algebra
From album: Cacophony
Genre: Darktronica
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

Hey, I need your help with testing this new streaming mp3 player I made. It seems to work fine for me, but we all know that’s never the end of it. If you would be so kind as to try it out and let me know if everything works for you: fast forward, rewind, volume, pause/play, and the draggable playhead, (which should appear when the song is fully loaded) I would appreciate it greatly! If something doesn’t work or doesn’t work correctly, please leave a comment about it!

This is Dhal, the current band of Downy’s Aoki Robin. I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to post a song of theirs, but I’m using it to christen the new streaming player. I used this song to test during the course of creating, coding, and debugging the mp3 player; so I have listened to different bits of it probably thousands of times in the past 24 hours. So the fact that I’m not sick of it by now is saying something indeed.

I’ve become a bit desensitized to it by now, but It still feels like the song is being played, or listened to, in a vacuum. Probably the vacuum of space. It’s the kind of dark where you see blackness everywhere, except for the light of interplanetary eclipses and their reflections.

A little while ago Mictian mentioned a Dhal Fansite which has some more information on the band.