Great night yesterday at Le Bourg. We didn’t expect so many people to come actually! So I guess it was a success.
I was the first one to play. Everything went smoothly and I managed to project visuals. I recorded my set, you can download it here: http://www.furibond.com/sounds/tokoloten_-_live_@_le_bourg_lausanne.mp3
3 parts: Noise - Ambient - Abstract hip-hop/electronica
On Mai 19 takes place “Les Chaises Musicales” at Le Bourg. 6 artists from the swiss electronic/experimental music scene will play. Les Poissons Autistes kindly proposed me to participate. Sets will be 30-minute long, I’m now preparing mine that should be made of 3 parts: 1. Noise / 2. Ambient / 3.Beats! I will be using some cool stuff like a game controller, a magnet motor, contact mic… and I plan to run a Processing patch for doing visuals. Lots of things to control for my small brain!
The line-up is:
22:00 DJ Philipella (one of the 2 heads of Les Poissons Autistes)
22:30 Tokoloten (me)
23:00 Les Poissons Autistes
23:30 Sanatorium
00:00 Bio
00:30 Hopen
01:00 Larkian
01:30 DJ Philippella
I still have some old k7 tapes at my parents’ house. Some I recorded 15 years ago and some older from the 60’s which belonged to my parents… This medium is completely obsolete nowadays.
I even found some recordings I did with my best friend when I was around 14 years old. We used a Revox tape recorder and recorded many instruments: drums, piano, african percussions and even synth sounds using midi program on a Mac. We were trying to do hip-hop! And the result was quite… bizarre.
The way we record music has dramatically changed. We’re now in the digital age and the production cycle is getting shorter and shorter thanks to computers. But I’m sure some people are still using vintage tools… just because they love them. For instance Jérôme Noetinger uses a Revox on stage, not as a recorder but as a mechanical object for making electro-acoustic sounds.
(Copy/paste from Wikipedia) Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices such as guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.
If you miss the 8-bit sound of your old beloved NES, then you should like this track by Maru…
Maru: Fairy tale confusion
Maru and USK have created Portalenz, one of the top chip tunes group in Japan. They use gameboys and bent instruments (TI speak & spell for instance) on stage. Rock on!
In 1962, The Ventures toured Japan for the first time and inspired a new musical genre in Japan called “Eleki”. So many teenagers started playing electric guitar that manufacturers couldn’t keep up with the demand. Takeshi Terauchi stood out from all those new electric guitarists and he’s probably the first japanese guitar hero. Even though his music is Ventures-influenced, he’s more acrobatic with an agressive picking style and a liberal use of his guitar’s whammy bar. Better yet, he applied surf guitar arrangements to ancient Japanese tunes usually played on the shamisen.
Another post on Zappa… but this version of “Peaches in Regalia” is killing me. The track is from 1969 (”Hot Rats” album) but here it’s in 1976, Zappa used to play some tunes year after year but always revisited versions. Look how powerful the introduction is with Bozzio on drums and Zappa on guitar.
Update: Unfortunately the video of “Peaches in Regalia” has been removed from YouTube. Here is another one which is great too.
One of my favorite musician: Otomo Yoshihide. I’ve bought the remake of Eric Dolphy’s “Out To Lunch” he’s done with his New Jazz Orchestra (ONJO). It’s brilliant… as usual.
Below are some links to a great documentary on Frank Zappa broadcast on german TV after Zappa passed away in 1993. After watching this you should love him as much as I do… mmm not sure of that…
First words of FZ in the documentary: “Don’t expect friends, don’t expect fun, don’t expect a good life, don’t expect anything and then if you get something it’s a bonus.”
