January 20, 2007
Tokyo drifter
As Michael has mentioned, he and I are doing a gig in Tokyo on 8 February. Here's the flyer. I'm not sure if it's finalised, so the Japanese may not be accurate. I am told that the question under Ches & Dale is 'Like cheese?'.
It's been fun working with Michael again. It's just like old times, except better really, since we know how to do what we want to do and it's all for a bit of fun.
What I am taking more seriously is my own set for this event, which consists of taking the best tracks I've done and adding house beats. Does that sound awful? Actually it's not. I've realised that a lot of the tracks I've done that seemed okay but were lacking something, were actually lacking rhythmic spine.
Other embellishments include samples pinched from the AWESOME ShortWaveMusic blog. Plus field recordings I've made myself. The net effect is a bunch of tracks tied together with the common theme of tui song and loops of women singing Eastern european folklieder. Not sure how all this came to be. I do like the immediacy of the human voice, and I certainly like the crazy shit tuis squawk.
Even if sameyness is an issue, this set is still the best I've done, and if I could have 2006 all over again, I would have held off doing 'International Travel' [ * ] and done this instead. Still, you live and learn. It just remains to be seen what the Japanese think about it.
[ * ] Speaking of this brave and rather weird CD, Sally suggested taking several copies over to hand out at the gig. I said that it was a good idea, but because the thing is covered in photos of Japan, it'd be as weird as Japanese coming here and handing out CDs with photos of rotorua, sheep, Maori culture groups, and the Sky Tower.
Posted by stuart at January 20, 2007 8:21 PM