hoshizora

head fucked up from allergy medicine (which incidentally both did not help my allergies and also kept me up most of the night! WAY TO BE, MODERN PHARMACY) but this song is putting me back on track.

Good ol' Tamio Okuda.

Hey Hey Hey, Tamio Okuda

I'm on this inexplicable soul kick right now. This is just the tip of the soul iceberg, right now. Like the soul itself, my ability to absorb groove is infinite, irrational, unknowable.

Get Yo Shit, by Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears

I'm Gonna Getcha, by Eli "Paperboy" Reed & the True Loves

And this is just some random J-hip-hop that palais gave me and I can't stop skating to. It's good for going fast. Also it's got this really great scratchy sample in it where a guy says "There's a lotta people in this world, but ain't a one gives a damn about me" and I dunno. It's just cool.

Norainu, 刃頭 Featuring Ill-Bosstino

I love it when I run across something that seems just improbably perfectly matched to my tastes.

Like how Summer in Andalusia is an anime made by a bunch of Ghibli expats about a domestique in the Vuelta a España (i.e. it is a really great cycling cartoon, and I love both cycling AND cartoons.)

The latest case of this is the discovery of "Bongo Rock" by The Incredible Bongo Band, which basically consists of down-and-dirty, brassy, distorted-organ-y covers of '60s surf rock tunes, e.g.:



I love surf melodies, big brass sections, grungy organ solos, and breakbeats. THIS HAS ALL OF THAT STUFF.

This may be the greatest roller skating music ever committed to physical media.

Anyways so upon a couple of listens-through I'm really enjoying the new Bishop Allen album.

Dimmer is my new theme song

...is touring this spring!

And they have a new album out!

eeeeeeeeee

In order to locate a creative direction for this ludicrous mini-album you people have gotten me to do, I have had to dig deep.

Part of this process has been the creation of ridiculous euphemisms for each person who's volunteered for this dubious honor.

The identity of some of these people is obvious. Others: Less so. I'll never tell.

• The Israeli Intelligence Community
  
• Alison Wonderfan
  
• Official Funkytown Arbiter of Taste
  
• The Alarming Girl in the Equally Alarming Blue Dress
  
• An Anglophile of Some Vague Acquaintance
  
• WHOCOULDTHISBE
  
• The Lexicon
  
• The Bureau of Ambivalence
  
• Ramblin' Prose
  
• Get it? Capital PUNishment?
  

(This may run past December. Don't worry. Still gonna happen.)

So! I've been working on and off on an Avatar FST for months. I'm pretty much never going to top the ones I've seen various friends come up with (yeah, EK and Ali, you know who you are) but it's been bugging me for a long time, so I'm finally calling it finished and uploading it.

You can download linked tracks individually or the whole thing as a zip! ENJOY.

( Read on for the tracks, snippets of lyrics, and what passes for exegesis around here. )

I have taken screenshots of iTunes displaying ALL OF MY PLAYLISTS.

Here are the rules: If you want to see the contents of a playlist, comment, and I shall reply with a screenshot -- but you must then reciprocate by SPREADING THE MEME.

Here goes, starting with the nerdy shit:



( And here's the rest )

Alright. Here's the ringtone list.

( The lucky ten. )

I've just gotten a big translation contract, which means I will be much busier through December than I initially thought I would be. HOWEVER. I shall still endeavor to complete these by the end of the year.

I'm thinking of starting a little sideline composing ringtones for a small price, somewhere in the $5-$20 range. When you receive yours, do let me know if you feel that this would be something you would conceivably pay for, and how much it might have been worth.

I recently composed a ringtone, and it was fun.

So now I'd like to do some more.

If you want a custom ringtone written by me just for you, comment here! I will supply you with an MP3 file by the end of the year. If I have you in my address book, this file will become the ring associated with you, but more importantly, you can put it on your own phone and/or give it to friends! Whatever!

If you have specific mood/texture requests, please note them in your comment.

That is all.

Things are monumentally weird right now. Not even bad. Just weird. So instead of talking about the events in my life that even I don't truly understand, I'm going to talk about something that none of you will probably care about, but which has been a source of solace for me for the past several months.

I'm going to talk about the music of On Any Sunday.

On Any Sunday is a 1971 documentary about motorcycling. My father is a great fan, and I watched it countless times in my youth. What stuck with me for years -- aside from the love of two-wheeled vehicles -- was the incredible soundtrack.

Composed by the prolific Dominic Frontiere and performed by an assortment of amazing session musicians including the great Carol Kaye on bass, the film score is some kind of masterpiece of late '60s-early '70s commercial jazz. I don't know how else to put it.

I love all the tracks, but the highlight is undoubtedly the 2'45" funk number "Sunday Drivin'." Starting off with an incredibly tight groove laid down by Kaye and drummer Larry Bunker, it launches into a guitar- and brass-driven crescendo that piles on note after note to a stack of chords that finally explodes (collapses?) into a gloriously driving melody that in turn gives way to a psychedelic guitar solo before repeating the whole thing with an organ and then -- yes -- a harmonica.

It is joy. The album was released only on vinyl, and routinely goes for over a hundred bucks on eBay. But I have a copy.

Now you, too, can hear this incredible song, and I hope you'll take from it some small measure of the pleasure it has brought me.

[DOWNLOAD]

And yes, now that you mention it, I do miss writing for a magazine.

Tom Waits was brilliant. Tears streaming down my face during "Day After Tomorrow." Great to see Gabe & Lexi again. Hell of a weekend. The world is a beautiful place.

The Youth Orchestra of Venezuela tears the shit out of Mambo.

Macross has it right. Music is going to save the world.

Rolling Stone Japan did an unprecedented list of the top 100 Japanese rock albums of all time; translation and comments over at Neojaponisme. My thoughts are in the comment thread over there.

Encouraging that a list like this was even published, despite my complaints with its actual contents.

I want the Go! Team to do an extended cover of the 3-2-1 Contact theme.

I was playing around in GarageBand and realized that what I was doing was making an Avatar Season Three/Fire Nation Something. It is just over a minute long, but what do you want from one evening's noodling?

Kind of unsequenced and messy and lame and ugh that poor D minor fifth. I am beating it to death and it didn't do anything to deserve this kind of hamfingered treatment.

But at least I have my studio back. HUZZAH.

Listen/Download here.

tenebris pointed out a few days ago that Bishop Allen, a mutual favorite band of ours for several years (!) now, was coming through Houston.

I was feeling sort of crappy last night, and almost didn't go. Thank god I went. They were great. I bought a nice t-shirt (it has butterflies on it!) and tried to work up the courage to go over to the dudes afterwards and tell them how much "Thinks Are What You Make Of Them" meant to me, especially in the Bad Old Days in Japan.

I wasn't able to, but it was still a great show. I heartily encourage the purchase of their music -- they have sample mp3s on their site, and you can buy high-quality downloadable versions of all of their music there as well. I haven't listened to their latest album yet, but it just finished downloading, and based on the show, it's going to be excellent.

As for why I haven't mentioned Bishop Allen much in the past, despite them being one of my very favorites -- they're not a band I talk about. They're a band I listen to.

I could definitely get used to this whole "actual music scene" thing.

I have a bunch of goofy, themed-playlists in iTunes. They include things like "Music for my funeral," "Pump up the Genk," "Catchy like Nets," "I Won't Go Back" (A bunch of anti-church songs, that one) "Stay Hungry: The Newtype Mix," and so on.

I got this great idea for a touching new one: "Songs I will sing to my children someday." Started throwing tracks into it.

Just had a listen through, and there's a problem. It is heartbreaking.

Oops.

I guess I just finished an EP! Six whole songs! I would love to know if anybody else gets them stuck in their head as badly as I do.