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.
If you’ve seen Tarantino’s “Kill Bill”, you likely remember the “O’Ren Ishii Revenge” sequence which is one of the most memorable. Tarantino requested for the japanese studio Production I.G. to work on this animation sequence; Kazuto Nakazawa directed it. The result is very impressive… 1 year of work to achieve this. I like the sketchy style of the characters.
And the music definitely plays a very important role. It’s almost fully taken from the Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack of “Death Rides a Horse”, a spaghetti western released in 1968 starring Lee Van Cleef (cool face!). On the other hand, the last music, when Ishii is on the roof, comes from “Truck Turner”, a 1974 movie with Isaac Hayes (who did the music as well).
3 obvious influences: japanese anime + spaghetti westerns + blaxploitation,
among many others like samurai movies…
It’s also funny to notice that a sentence seems to be taken from the “Death Rides a Horse” trailer: “The bandits who killed 5 defenceless people made a big mistake: they should have killed… 6.” Listen to the end of the video, you’ll hear something close.
p.s. I think the film I like the most from Tarantino is not “Kill Bill” but “Jacky Brown”.
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.”
By visiting the top links on this blog you learn about my musical project tokoloten but there’s nothing that tells what actually means “tokoloten”. Well, “tokoloten” as such doesn’t mean anything but “tokoroten” does (see the “r”?). It is a japanese dish of thin translucent jelly strips. It is usually served cold and eaten with vinegar-based dressing. Believe me, it’s delicious! I’ve changed the “r” into “l” because japanese pronounce the “r” letter as “l”. Got it?
I liked the word and the food, so I stole it! And my music sounds like tokoroten looks by the way!
Interesting stuff found on Flickr. Alexandre Duret-Lutz (aka gadl) first builds 360° panoramas (by shooting hundreds pictures), then makes a sphere using stereographic projections. The results, as shown below, look like small planets. He calls them Wee Planets. Nice and even funny!
