A Staycation in Tokyo With Jimi Hendrix
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Artist:
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Track:burning of the midnight lamp
Ivylander suggested in a recent post that now is a good time to air the real oddities in our collections: "After all, we humiliate ourselves in front of a minimal crowd." The man knows how to appeal to our egos - Who can resist such a challenge?
The clear winner in my collection of strangeness is a record (unfathomably not released digitally) called 'When The Bomb Drops'. It attempts to give an aural experience of an A-Bomb dropping on your town! and contains the memorable vignette, as the bass speakers shake with the rumble emanating from Ground Zero and the heat blast engulfs all before it, of a man screaming in anguish, "My faaaace! It's mellllting!"
Melting faces of a different sort on another album which laughably "creates" an aural LSD trip through a mix of by-numbers psychedelic rock, a voice-of-doom narrator and acid heads proselytising the New Tomorrow. In the early '90s, when it briefly looked like trip-hop was going mainstream, a studio musician and I planned chart domination with a wobbly-brain track using soundbites from the album. From 12 inches loaded with psychedelic loopiness we opted for a girl describing in tripped out breathlessness the grooviness of taking a shower while rushing. "…It was all silver and sparkly on my body….it was groovy…!" I agree with you: why isn't this album on iTunes?
LSD flows again in an album of a BBC interview with author Aldous Huxley. You expect the lysergic experience to be expounded by vaguely articulate airheads speaking Californian. It's something else when described in clipped upper-class elocution by one of the intellects of the 20th century. Yes, once again you are being denied a Long Tail download experience.
For digitised oddness I look under 'J'. Last weekend at Castle Ingham we had a staycation in Japan. It was the 12 year-old's idea. We dressed in kimono and yukata, made Japanese meals all weekend, watched anime and yakuza movies (you do need to see 'Yakuza Graveyard'), and listened to my CDs. From a stack of unusual music, the band audio active gets attention. The album '[tokyo space cowboys]' is from 1994, and brings together two popular genres of the time, reggae and electro. Reggae has long had a hardcore following, perhaps at its dizziest with the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. Some of the electro exponents I saw in the 80s were breathtaking in concept, most audacious of all being Radical TV, who had a TV studio onstage and mashed up live and recorded video to the beats and beeps.
Audio active tied up early with Adrian Sherwood of On-U Sound, and the results have titles like "Auditory Nerve Celebration" and "Wah Wah Zoo Mars". For stoned weirdness their interpretation of Jimi Hendrix is pretty damn hard to beat.
audio active
Comments (8)
Woah Jonh, Ivy's challenge was excepted and delivered with panache.
Nice way to vacation. I'll have to rip off your idea for the folks at Chateau du Zinzen Heilman.
Yakuza Graveyard? I am so there.....
Please, please, please post your trip-hop track. I promise to be reverential.
Gotta go now and score some audio active.....
I like the premise, I'll see what I have in store.
dang, you guys are pulling out the deep cuts for this arent ya
I am - it's a great way to see the world without any of the travel hassle. This weekend - Rome. But without the mid-70s Italian prog rock.
Ivy - 'Yakuza Graveyard' is a mid-70s work by Kinji Fukasaku, who directed 'Battle Royale'. He's very influenced by European 'New Wave' and has a very cynical view of government and the police. In it, the cops and the yakuza are one and the same, and the hero - who is pretty amoral while having a code of honour - does a good impression of Belmondo in 'Breathless'. All at high-speed, radical jump cuts, ultra-violence and lurid colour. All in all, perfect family viewing.
Oatmeal - look for those beauties that have fallen down behind the shelves and blow off the dust!
Rawk - Think of it as gentleman's Mog Wars...some light flesh wounds and exclamations of "I'll be alright. The bullet only creased me."
Jonh, sounds like a worthy bookend to a film I liked a lot, Nagisa Oshima's "Cruel Story of Youth" (also one of the great movie titles of all time).
Now you're talking my language! What an amazing film that is. The scene where the "hero" and his girlfriend are waking on the lumber in the water and he shoves her in, and the camera does a long tracking shot while he keeps pushing her fingers off the lumber so she can't get out. Nihilism always looks better in Japanese. Another fantastic Oshima film is "Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief".
Its only a flesh wound..........I get it! Now let me head back to my collection, I see a post later tonight