October 31, 2004
Ghost | Hypnotic Underworld |Drag City | Japan
buy it
Progressive rock and jazz fusion are the two sides of the same Othello game piece. Both tend to pull from a humble vagabond's bag of tricks--Celtic and English folksong on the white side and the blues on the black. Both hold instrumental virtuosity in high esteem and have no fear of extended track lengths, fuzz guitars and orgiastic displays of improvisation. Being remote in both time and space from the origins of these two musical movements, Japan's Ghost is a band free to pull from both trick bags while holding a third bag of their own Eastern mysticism and musicality.
October 28, 2004
News | Interview: Paul Fisher |
As a writer for fRoots magazine, a D.J. on London's Resonance FM, and a compiler of the Rough Guide CDs for China, Thailand, Okinawa, Japan and Indonesia, Paul Fisher has spent well over a decade leading new listeners to East Asian music--particularly that of Japan. Fisher first visited Japan in 1990, a trip that wound up lasting into 2001. He spent the time well, creating Far Side Music, a company which, among other things, runs the best East Asian music shop on the internet. I contacted him in the UK to ask him about the music of Japan and get some expert picks of new releases.
READ FULL ENTRY...October 25, 2004
Various | G.I. Funk |Payback | Vietnam
The latest find in my never-ending quest for 60s & 70s Asian pop compilations features a potentially fascinating concept: create a best-of CD from various funk acts that entertained U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War.
READ FULL REVIEW...October 18, 2004
Mei Han & Randy Raine-Reusch | Distant Wind |Za Discs | China
Buy It
I'm definitely a latecomer to this disc by composers/zheng players Mei Han and Randy Raine-Reusch, but this is definitely a case of better late than never. One dubious advantage to my tardiness is that I get to read all the reviews that came out at the time of its release. My favorite comes from no less a critic than The Wire's Clive Bell, who says, "Their mission is to rescue the zheng from the highly hysterical sentimentality that pervades much Chinese music..." I couldn't agree more.
October 11, 2004
News | New Kids on the Tatami | Japan
It's not every day you can write the words pin-up and shamisen in the same paragraph, but the PR guy for the Yoshida Brothers gets to do just that:
"Still in their early 20's, Ryoichiro and Kenichi, also known as the Yoshida Brothers, are the newest sensation in traditional Japanese World Music, achieving pin-up status with an ever-growing legion of fans. The brothers play a Tsugaru-Shamisen, a three-stringed instrument resembling the banjo and with a style originating from northern Japan with intricate and fast picking."
Like Chinese female counterparts 12 Girls Band, the brothers have hit it big in Asia with their contemporized traditional sound and are trying to do the same in the US with their second release. Hit the link below for dates on their current US publicity tour.
READ FULL ENTRY...October 07, 2004
News | "A Pinoy rock thing" | Philippines
This week the Manila Times has a long piece on the legendary Juan de la Cruz Band. While the Philippines was still under the Marcos regime, the band began performing heavy psychedelic music and singing in their native tongue, Tagalog--neither of which was the norm in Filipino pop. An original copy of the band's Up in Arms (re-released in 2003 on Germany's Normal records) now fetches $1,000 from psych record collectors, but in a typical rags-to-rags tale, the members don't have much to show for their efforts. They've never won an award in the Philippines and their occasional reunion gigs take place in bars rather than stadums.