Hollow me!!

In the last days, especially after watching Love Exposure, I grew a taste for YYT's last album. Since the compilation I posted only presented works until 2004, I share here Kudo Desu.

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Yura Yura Teikoku!!

Raw electrifying riffs, intense melodic bass loops, flashy sonic sounds, deep electronic beats and beguiling pop tunes; the reincarnation of the dying modern youth, an elegy to the boogying guitars of a zombified Sonics, cracked on Suicide and devouring the flesh of Can; this is Yura Yura Teikoku (ゆらゆら帝国)!!

It took 16 year for this Tokyo underground three-piece set, formed in 1989, to finally meet some attention overseas. With the success of their 2005 album Sweet Spot (for Mesh-Key records), the band ventured to New York for a few minor concerts proving the American audience that they could beat the carcass of any dead rock star legend with their electric riffing strains and psychedelic refrains. However what they [the audience] were listening to they had no idea. Sometimes the Japanese group seemed to fall into a noise oriented post-rock constant of some sort of nipponic Sonic Youth. Other times the electronics soared higher reaching the voltaic sound of Stereolab. In further occasions the psychedelism of krautrock filled in; but in all, reminiscences of a later Link Wray and art-punk Television (sometimes even high beats of Led Zeppelin) drew their power in the background. 

But on their creation, Yura Yura Teikoku had a very different composition. Their early stage performances -long hair, no shirt, shaking heads – evoke a nostalgic feeling for an old 70’s Japanese garage show where Shinki Chen would happily allow himself to trash some psychedelic melodic lo-fi garage punk-rock [in another dimension]. Consisting of three guitars and one drum case, the Japanese band transpired hefty vibes of unpretentious garage rock (their more experimental works would only come a few years later). Characterized by the heavy plodding drums of Onsen Shimoda, the dissonant screaming lo-fi voice of guitarist/vocalist Shintaro Sakamoto (坂本 慎太郎) and biting dancing riffs, the sound that arises is raw and stinging. 

With time however the songs would become more poppy and structured (even though the raw roots would always remain in their sound). The last album with Onsen Shimoda, Are you Ra? (1996), already lights the path the band would follow in the future period. However only with the entrance of drummer Ichiro Shibata (柴田 一郎) would the group take a more defined route to their music. In 1997 the band’s arrangement changed to a fixed three set with Shintaro Sakamoto on vocals and guitar, Chiyo Kamekawa (亀川 千代) as bassist and Ichiro Shibata on the drums. The first albums recorded under this configuration resulted in an epic trilogy for the Midi label (3x3x3, Me no Car, Yura Yura Teikoku III). Here the recordings seem to have found consistency in jamming psychedelic pop tunes, catchy and danceable sonorous flows; a psychedelic triumph. 

Now evolved to a pop dream of slack sweaters and tight jeans, the Japanese trio opened the doors to greater experimental desire. After the groovy Yura Yura Teikoku III, the band released two new albums (Yura Yura Teikoku No Shibire and Yura Yura Treikoku No Memai) in the same year. This time the recording counted with the collaboration of other “guest” musicians who joined the sessions to take the trio sound even further; keyboards, organs and beat synthesizers were added to the psychedelic rocking trend making it flow on even more progressive sources. The sound is not comparable to the previous releases as it approaches much more than before the boundaries of electronic ambiance. A feature that seems to cling and is taken along into their last two albums (Sweet Spot and Kudo Deso).

Trying to choose a single album against all others is an aching task. To pick a record from their first heavy rocking years with Onsen Shimoda, from the epic psychedelic garage pop trilogy, or from the awesome electronic pop “faces” (No Shibire and No Memai), the gritty live performance of Na.Ma.Shi.Bi.Re.Na.Ma.Me.Ma.I, or the last fiery recordings of their career would just be the same as choosing a mental state, a mood over other and that's sacrilegious; YYT’s sound behaves like a mutant monster, altering shapes and currents of melodic programs; of acid rushing the blood tunnels tripping from a soft cradle of Japanese pop to a dancing cube of red neon guitars; a pop-punk garage rockin’ revival (however I will post a nice compilation from the years of 1998-2004, so that a taste can be given). 

PS. Sion Sono's Love Exposure, hollow me!! 

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Raymond Scott, the electronic castle-builder

''It was the size of a football field! More than half a dozen big rooms, impeccably set-up. The floors were painted like a high class industrial laboratory. He had a whole room of metal-working equipment, a room full of wood-working equipment, and this huge barn of a room for electronics.'' – Bob Moog

Raymond Scott was an architect and a visionary. A composer, a bandleader and an inventor, he was one of the first to dive in the mesmerizing world of electronic music. Parting away from the French musique concrète and following Meyer-Eppler’s revolutionary idea of elektronische Musik (found in his 1949 thesis “Elektronische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache”), Scott was moved by the infinite possibilities that computers represented for the future of sound. Among his creations are the Electronium, - one of the first machines to use artificial intelligence in the composition of music - the “Karloff” and the Clavivox (as can be seen in the picture above).

During his career he worked with the likes of Bob Moog (inventor of the Moog synthesizer) and director Jim Henson (most famously known as the creator of the Muppets). His electric compositions were also used by Carl Stalling in many of Warner Brothers’ comic-sketches and celebrated cartoons. And although forgotten in the threads of time, his creation still lives in the consciousness of today’s automated music, his name listed among those who pioneered in the realm of the futuristic computerized sound creation like Tristram Cary, Kid Baltan and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Born as Harry Warnow in 1908, Raymond always displayed a natural talent for music (and even though he insisted in his vocation for engineering); he was encouraged by his brother to enter the music scenery and in 1931 he graduated Julliard School of Music where he studied piano, theory and composition. He then began his professional career as a pianist for the CBS Radio house band where his brother conducted the orchestra. But being a visionary he quickly grew sick of the dull music played by his fellow musicians and soon started presenting his own pieces. In 1936 he finally created his own music group, a six-piece band that went by the name of “Raymond Scott Quintette” (reasons are he liked the sound of it). His Dadaist compositions and their senseless names, like “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals” and “New Year's Eve in a Haunted House”, soon made a hit and in 1938 he became the music director of CBS expanding his quintet to a big-band. He then dropped for two years to take his band on tour but returned in 1942 assembling at this time the first racially-mixed studio orchestra in broadcast history.

He was now more preoccupied with composition and directing and little by little he left the performance entirely to others. His obsession with perfectionism and the avant-garde scene drove him to the world of electronics where he pursued a successful career in producing commercial jingles for radio and television. In 1946 he founded the first electronic music studio (in his house), the Manhattan Research Inc. which he  happily described as "more than a think factory - a dream center where the excitement of tomorrow is made available today.”

His electronic compositions invoke the vision of what one sitting in a 1956 Mercury XM Turnpike Cruiser Limbo with browline glasses, a Homburg hat and a grey flannel suit would imagine the future to be like. It invites us to space-travelling outside the boundaries of the mind; just imagine yourself sitting in the car and listening to some commercials like Nescafé, Twinkies, Auto-Lite and Vicks: Formula 44 (“ahora Pancho es feliz!”), tripping all the way to your job. Things get even more whacky in Scott’s own experiments outside the realms of commercial projects like the remasterization of his own early jazz hit Twilight in Turkey, the minimal sound of Cyclic Bit or the 1968’s trippy Backwards Overload. It antedates the prominent use of synthesizers in psychedelic and progressive rock in the 1970s and today’s electronic music of the psychedelia wave. Some of his most iconic pieces can also be found in the soundtrack of some of Jim Henson’s experimental films like Limbo: the Organized Mind, a trip through the brain of a man, or in Paperwork Explosion, a piece-cut commercial for the revolutionizing IBM MT/ST machine. 

Raymond Scott was a dreamer, a visionary, an electronic castle-builder!

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Do you believe in love at first sight? – a journal (2)

In the past two months I allowed myself by "pure chance" to watch the different faces of love.

The first incarnation of love was brought to me by Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa); the silent pain of impossibility; the loneliness of two existences that try to subordinate their selves to the languid pace of their dead lives.

Covering feelings in a guise of acceptance and solitude, a journalist and a secretary set their lives shut in a small world or four walls while their spouses keep absent in work. The dominance of curiosity and loneliness drives both to form ways to see each other - on the hall that crosses their rooms or at the Mahjong games organized by the house lady.  A crescendo of chance encounters moves both characters to the juncture of shared thoughts and guilty looks –the brief meeting on the stairs where a single second and a glimpse unseen tell a whole story of two worlds set to collide (a scene brilliantly covered by the music of Shigeru Umebayashi).

Two grow suspicious of their partners’ fidelity and their constant absence coming to the conclusion that their spouses have been seeing each other. The woman wonders how their spouses' affair might have begun, and together they re-enact what they imagine might have happened. Until the world turns into a theater for a foul love.

The film's original Chinese title Fa yeung nin wa  ("the age of blossoms") is a Chinese metaphor for the fleeting time of youth, beauty and love deriving from a song  of the same name by Zhou Xuan, one of China’s seven greatest singing stars (source: Wikipedia).

The movie’s scenery set in a 1960’s Hong Kong’s is visually spirited with the 46  cheongsam dressed by actress Maggie Cheung, patterns of lurid lines and flamboyant shades, and nimble passages through lights of vivance. 

Michael Galasso - Scenes (1984)

The album Scenes (1984) is an original composition for violin written and performed by the American musical director Michael Galasso. The music follows a dense minimalist line, of vibrant airs and automated echoes (achieved on solo violin); an expressive and raw performance with dark nuances of the new age and the neo-classical genre.

tap tap tap! a sad waltz of a wicked dream

dance dance dance! a sad dance of a bad dream

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Michael Galasso was an American composer and violinist who wrote mostly - original pieces - for picture films. He worked in many movies including Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) and Chungking Express (1994). In 2009 he was awarded with the César Award for Best Music Written for a Film for the French director Marin Provost’s movie Séraphine.

John Blow - Venus & Adonis

Following the mood of last post I decided to bring up a musical interpretation of Ovid’s myth, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis.

This three-act piece originally presented as a “masque for the entertainment of the King” was written for the court of King Charles II and first performed in Oxford in 1681. It is considered by some to be the “earliest surviving English opera” (source: The New Grove) but its structure with numerous dances and musical interludes resembles a masque while its historical position in the Restoration period as well as its brevity point out a semi-opera.

The libretto has for a long time been attributed to the renowned English dramatist Aphra Behn but recently its authorship has been rejected and the composition finally credited to Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea [and maid of honour to the Duchess of York]. The work includes a number of comical scenes like the spelling lesson of the young cupids and the discussion of Venus and Adonis about the “forces” of love. It mocks the fleeting and debauched courtly love, where only "the foolish, ugly and the old" are faithful;

Cupid

     Courtiers, there is no faith in you,

     You change as often as you can:

     Your women they continue true

     But till they see another man.

 (…)

Cupid

     At court I find constant and true

     Only an aged lord or two

The satire becomes even more amusing when we learn that Cupid was played by Lady Mary Tudor, King Charles’ illegitimate daughter (daughter of Davis and the King), and Venus by Mary "Moll" Davis, the King's mistress.

Blow’s composition is in many senses unique and inventive. Even though it shares some of the period’s tendencies, especially those held by the French opera, of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédie-lyrique – as is the case of the Overture and the edifying Prologue, as well as the large display of popular dances such as the Sarabrand and the Gavatt - the piece follows a very innovative composition with no strict order of arias and musical interludes, allowing for a large use of chorus (so much appreciated by the English). Likewise, opposing the period’s tradition of happy endings (in Baroque opera, myths were often rewritten to have happy endings) Blow’s Venus and Adonis ends tragically.

Here you can download Harmonia Mundi’s edition, conducted by René Jacobs.

Do you believe in love at first sight? – a journal (1)

Peter Paul Rubens - Venus & Adonis (detail) ca. 1635

"Once, when Venus’ son [Eros] was kissing her, his quiver dangling down, a jutting arrow, unbeknown, had grazed her breast. She pushed the boy away. In fact the wound was deeper than it seemed, though unperceived at first. [And she became] enraptured by the beauty of a man [Adonis]." (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10. 525 ff; trans. Melville)

Eros appears in ancient Greek sources under several guises. In the earliest sources, such as the cosmogonies and the Eleusinian mysteries, he is referred as being one of the primordial gods coming into existence right after the advent of Chaos, Gaia and Tartarus. In other myths he is the son of Aphrodite and in later works, appears as a blindfolded child (signifying the blindness of love) which is the precursor to the famous chubby Cupid of Renaissance paintings.

According to the myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one day Cupid accidentally pierces her mother with one of his arrows making Venus fall in love with the first person she sees, the young and handsome Adonis.

Ah, and that’s how love chances! Love always happens at first sight. Love always comes at first glance. It can take seconds or years but, every time, its threads are cast at the first baffled stare. As if we just opened our eyes to the world for the first time, ever being shut until the moment the lid is lifted and the design [creation] unveiled.

Forces are difficult to fathom, moving us on erected filaments, guided on silver strings. Gently tossed and flung into shades and beams of silhouettes we don’t descry. The hesitant steps, the modest smiles, the timid look under the dark shade of hair. Two young outsiders in an innocent game of tag. 

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous” 

- Ingrid Bergman

Then suddenly it happens, just like a spell, just like magic, two people speaking a dialect only they tell, a mute vibrating language of rhythms and pulsations.

The realm mutates.

Sea and air gush its blue, overflowing their shades above the frame [sketch, skeleton]. Rosy-red blurs of movement and yellow drops of fate. Colours shine brighter, music sounds louder, lips move faster, words mute… and everything motionless. Blood rushes, the heat rises my crown and everything breathes. Everything lives. 

Paolo Veronese - Venus and Adonis 1582