World’s End Girlfriend (Japan)
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Song: We are the Massacre
From album: The Lie Lay Land
Genre: Surreal sound storyland
[Buy This Album][Label Site][Interview]
What a fabulous weekend media treat! World’s End Girlfriend is a musical portrayal of a place in its creator’s imagination. These songs are moments and locations that exist in it. Here thrive in sonic form: a gate made of moths, dark friendly forests, an endless midnight garden waltz, a lunatic celestial circus, moments of dissonance, serenity, and a perfect harmony. From beginning to end this 80 minute album is forceful, beautifully vivid, and wrought from pure inspiration. So without much further ado off we go:
VIDEO - Scorpius Circus (LIVE)
From gentle swell to ferocious tempest, this song ebbs and flows with emotional currents. In my opinion this song is much better live. And for a live version of a mostly electronic song to surpass the original without the use of any synthetic elements is, to me, both amazing and gratifying. This is definitely their jewel. (11:13 min 37 megs)
VIDEO - We are the Massacre
The video version reveals a vision simultaneously violent and tranquil; a gorgeously tragic and moving lamentation. WARNING: contains black and white clips of sometimes graphic movie violence. (5:46 min 31 megs)
Please be sure to check out the label site and download songs from their other artists, I find them to be uncommonly good as a whole. It’s also extremely rare for a Japanese label to give away so much for free! So if you like what you hear please support the artists and their forward-thinking label, and buy their excellent music. Have a great weekend!
January 28th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
wow, thank you for this amazing find. i’m listening to the collaboration they did with Mono, and it’s absolutely amazing. i can’t wait to hear this album. your site is GREAT, btw, i really look forward to more updates!
January 29th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Hey, thanks for coming. I enjoy these guys a lot, and find the creator’s vision very intriguing. Mono is great too, maybe I’ll put some of their stuff up someday. Got a bunch in the queue, it’s just about getting time to put it all together. Thanks again =)
January 29th, 2006 at 10:36 am
WEG is great, and of course the collaboration with Mono is outstanding. Can’t wait to see them both in concert in osaka and/or kyoto next month.
Just found this site, very interesting stuff, Red Ruin.
January 29th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Glad you like it. You live in japan?
February 1st, 2006 at 2:31 am
David,
Yeah, for the next 6 months I live in Japan. In Osaka, specifically.
February 1st, 2006 at 3:39 am
Very nice, I envy you your future concert experience. Let me know if you happen to come across any other particularly interesting music =)
February 1st, 2006 at 10:51 am
I have lots of strange Japanese music. I’ve been meaning to make a list that I can toss at people instead of listening of names of Japanese artists that Japanese people, for the most part, don’t know exist…
February 1st, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Yeah, there’s a whole lot of strange (which I have a ton of also) but, at least to me, it’s harder to find the exceptionally good stuff. However, when you do find it, it’s totally worth it.
February 2nd, 2006 at 8:26 am
That’s all music though, not just Japan, I’m sure you’ll agree.
February 2nd, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Oh exactly.
In fact, it seems to me that Japan’s music scene has striking parallels to its counterpart here in the US. It’s saturated with performance pop and bands driven by label surveys and desires. Though the US labels don’t go quite so far as say.. Johnny’s in admitting that they basically create bands to make money, that’s essentially what they do in many cases. In both countries there are a lot of bands that sound the same, many that are stuck within a genre, etc. And there are also some that are cutting through musical traditions and politics to make something new.
I do think that Japan is in a fairly unique position, given their cultural history, of pressure or tendency to conform to an extent; but with new generations displaying a more and more voracious appetite for individuality, I think we’ll get even more extreme shifts toward creating music that has never been done before. That’s probably a major reason why I’m so interested in it.
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:39 am
Those are very good points. I agree.