May 10, 2008
Hifana on French Television
I can’t understand a word of it, of course.
Posted by shane at 01:09 AM
Just. Can’t. Resist.
Posted by shane at 12:59 AM
May 07, 2008
New Interpol Video is ‘Visually Programmed’
An interesting video with a heavy use of programming, courtesy of Aaron Koblin. What is most interesting to me in this situation is that although there seems to be a trend emerging of music videos made with code, it has been confined mostly to individuals doing it with a very DIY spirit (ie unofficially borrowing music, and just posting the video for their friends). This one however is maybe the most blatant example I can think of of the trend crossing into the mainstream with a high profile band and big visibility. Could this momentum continue to explode? There certainly seems to be no shortage of ‘data artists’ who are popping up in ever greater numbers. The niche and minutiae of coding music videos can actually be traced very well by following just one man’s blog: Flight 404.
Posted by shane at 04:31 AM
May 06, 2008
Maledict Car by Kosai Sekine
Kosai Sekine directed the newest music video for our newest artist, Jemapur, and it looks great. The track is called Maledict Car, and below is a teaser of it. The full video will be included in Tokyo Lab’s upcoming DVD+book, Tokyo.Ten which is coming later this year. More info on the blog.
Posted by shane at 03:56 PM
April 19, 2008
Things I am Embarrased to Like
This new music video also seems to double as a ridiculous and elaborate ad for Pino. As someone who works in an advertising agency, I love that sort of thing (sarcasm…I think).
Below are Perfume again, during their middle-school days.
Posted by shane at 02:22 AM
April 17, 2008
Vacation
Steve Jobs talks about working with Paul Rand.
Posted by shane at 05:59 AM
April 16, 2008
Hello World
Great new site, Hello World for Softbank by THA. Reminiscent of Groovisions and somehow even reminds me of Katamary Damashii. Use the full screen mode. Wonderful!
Posted by shane at 05:36 AM
April 11, 2008
E-Naut May 3rd
I’ll be the VJ for Ametsub, an electronic musician who I really like at this E-Naut event in Roppongi Hills’ Mado Lounge on May 3rd. Ametsub is on Progressive Form, with the debut album Linear Cryptics that came out in 2006. Takamori K, who will be DJing this event, invited me. Taka is a prolific DJ who is also a copywriter at W+K.
Posted by shane at 09:39 PM
Tokyo.Ten
Tokyo.Ten is a project that’s been going on for quite a while now at Tokyo Lab. Its coming down to the wire, and finally I got my piece in for it, as the book will go out to print pretty soon. Tokyo.Ten is the tenth release from W+K Tokyo Lab, and will be a book+DVD full of our best videos, an archive of our work, and foremost a collection of artworks inspired by Tokyo from everyone we’ve ever collaborated with from day 1 (and who agreed to take part in the project). The process of many of the ongoing artworks have been made available at the Tokyo.Ten blog that has been ongoing for the past couple months, so check it out if you haven’t already. Look for the book in record stores and select shops in Japan in a couple months from now. Of course I’ll post again when the final release date is apparent.
Posted by shane at 03:05 AM
April 10, 2008
iGoogle Art Café
As part of W+KT’s ongoing Artist campaign for Google Japan, the iGoogle Art Café in Roppongi Hills will open starting this Saturday. iGoogle Art Café was concepted, designed and executed by WKT’s team Google, and will be open 11 AM to 11 PM through April 24th. Special Google menu, dessert, and drinks are also available. The café is in the event space that is opposite the entrance to TOHO cinemas, and the big spiraling staircase you would go up to enter Mori art museum.
The iGoogle artists page where you can download artists’ iGoogle skins and gadgets is here, and an iGoogle Art Café blog has also been started.
Posted by shane at 07:38 PM
My Website was Down
And now its back. I am constantly at the mercy of forces I don’t yet understand about the hosting of my site. My friend Carlos has been hosting my site for a long time, and finally this year we tried to transfer it to my own account with Dreamhost. Apparently the domain name has transferred over to me, although the files for the site are still stored in some other place I think. Beyond this, I need a big chunk of free time to figure all this out, and that is certainly something which is highly elusive in my life. So, if this website ever goes down again, apologies in advance to anyone who is paying attention, and you can safely assume that I am not working on the problem.
Posted by shane at 07:17 PM
March 05, 2008
Parallel Strokes
A great looking book by friend Ian Lynam has just been published. "Parallel Strokes is a collection of interviews with twenty-plus contemporary typeface designers, graffiti writers, and lettering artists around the world. The book is introduced with a comprehensive essay charting the history of graffiti, its relation to type design, and how the two practices relate in the wider context of lettering." Go order it from the website. A bargain at 20 US dollars with free international shipping.
Posted by shane at 02:42 AM
March 03, 2008
Steve Jansen with Takagi and Cornelius
Steve Jansen’s live show for his new album Slope came to Japan on Friday. Amazingly he recruited Takagi Masakatsu and Cornelius to perform as his band, along with a Japanese string quartet, and Shoko Ise on visuals. I want to say this was a great show, I am pretty sure it was, but much of the material was so ambient, the theater was very dark, and I had come straight from a long day (and week) of work, so I found myself very drowsy. All the musicians were great and must have been very well-rehearsed, but one thing that struck me is that for the vocal tracks, Steve did not sing; instead all vocals were pre-recorded, and the singing was done by the visual. He, and other vocal performers were recorded singing in some fashion, and played back on the large screen behind them during that particular track. All in all there was a strong human presence, with a nice integration of technology.
It was very dark in there, so my photos aren’t looking so good. The show was at a nice theater called Meguro Persimmon Hall, which I had never heard of before, tucked into a charming residential neighborhood near Toritsu Daigaku.
Posted by shane at 12:05 AM
February 27, 2008
Introducing Jemapur
We interviewed new artist for Tokyo Lab, Jemapur, the other day, and we should be on track to feature a new music video of his in our compilation tenth release, Tokyo.Ten. Read the interview on the new Tokyo.Ten blog, and also check his MySpace.
Posted by shane at 09:29 PM
February 25, 2008
Tujiko / Trust
Photos from the live show last week, I am way delayed in uploading. I’d like to point you to a Flickr account now where you could see many more, higher-res photos, but that’s one other web 2.0 service I have been meaning to start for the last three years and still haven’t. YouTube shows nothing from this show unfortunately. Great new quasi-album, Trust, coming out in March. Seven new tracks and seven remixes.
Posted by shane at 06:29 PM
February 19, 2008
Björk’s Reactable: A Reaction
I just returned from Björk’s live show, and I don’t mean to dodge the whole issue of the actual performance (it was quite good) but one thing that really stood out to me was that they used this technology that looked very familiar to me as a MIT Media Lab project that I remember seeing a few years ago. Throughout the show, this instrument was featured on screens as one of the musicians played with it, and I could swear I had seen it before, though I had remembered it as a prototype, not commercially available or otherwise attainable in any way except to these two MIT students who had developed it. I marveled at the fact that Björk–or whoever tipped her off to it–had found this thing, gone through the trouble of contacting the developers about using their invention, perhaps even convinced them to develop it further, and that this whole complicated transaction must have happened so I could ultimately see it used in this performance today.
But going home and researching, to my surprise, I was completely wrong! I did find the piece that I had remembered, its called Audiopad, was developed by James Patten and Ben Recht, and can be seen here as well as in the video above. What she is using is this other thing called the Reactable, made mostly by a team of four from Barcelona’s Pompeu Fabra University.
What’s really strange to me is that although the Reactable is literally almost the exact same thing as the Audiopad, there is very little mention of said device from the Reactable team. No real debt to it is given, although listed on top of the related page of Reactable’s website, and there is no indication of any transaction ever going on between the two teams behind the devices–although conspicuously, Audiopad was exhibited at Sonar festival in Barcelona in 2003. Same for James Patten’s page. No mention of Reactable whatsover.
Is Reactable just a rip-off of Audiopad? If so, do the two Audiopad creators care? After all, news about their invention seems to have died out. On YouTube, the Audiopad video with the most hits has around 7000. Reactable on the other hand got picked up by Björk, has cracked well over a million hits in YouTube, and is apparently being made into an actual product in the near future.
Björk seems to always be incorporating some kind of bleeding edge technology into her performances. Previous to Reactable, she was using Lemur before anyone else, and it still features in the show as well. My next question however is, does this explicit gizmo-flaunting actually add to the performance? This is a little tricky and could be compellingly argued either way, but ultimately I would say it does. I could start to say that it doesn’t, that they’re not doing anything in that live show that they couldn't accomplish without traditional synths and sequencers (which is true), but this is beyond the point, and smacks of hard-headed, narrow-minded music snobbery.
The point is that Björk is smart. If she hadn’t jumped on this thing before anyone else, I wouldn’t be writing this, would I? I could just be saying, hey she played these songs from these albums, had a nice harpsichord player and a brass section, danced around a bit, and was out. ¥9000 later I had a good time. But its not that simple. These machines look amazing, and everyone knows it. That’s why there is no VJ or prerecorded video in these shows–just a camera on the machines. They’re the goddamn interface from the bridge of the NCC-1701-D come to life, and just to control sounds, for fuck’s sake. And once that prototype becomes a real device and people start to talk about it, buy it, or use it, Björk’s name is going to come up in every one of those conversations as being the pioneer. Even if the devices aren’t adding a lot to the sound, they are in fact superseding that purpose with the role of providing atmosphere and the intangible value of creating an overall lasting experience. I guess what I mean to say is, if you ever find yourself questioning the sexificiation of technology, especially in relation to Björk, you need look no further than that gem from 1999.
Posted by shane at 11:09 PM
Tujiko Noriko This Weds
Tujiko Noriko is on a recent jaunt of Japan, purportedly having played live with Sailor Ojisan (can’t find link now, but highly amusing, and easy to imagine by taking the name literally) in Osaka, and now with a release party coming up this Wednesday. Her music seems to draw a lot of comparisons to Björk from overseas listeners, which I won’t take the time to comment on, but funnily enough, I will also be attending that performer’s show tomorrow night, so it’s on fools!
Posted by shane at 12:26 AM
February 18, 2008
DJ Codomo
The long-awaited proper first album from DJ Codomo is out and its really, really, extremely good. Kiiiiiii is also featured rapping on one track.
Posted by shane at 12:06 PM