Artist: Pochakaite Malko (ポチャカイテ マルコ)
Song: Laya
From album: ポチャカイテ マルコ (Pochakaite Malko)
[Buy CD][Website]

Here’s a band that I guess you would define as either progressive rock, avant garde, or Zeuhl depending on your level of music nerdiness.

I find them interesting and quite theatrical. This song, in the parts with vocals, reminds me a lot of the music of Cirque du Soleil; an outfit which pretty much embodies interesting theatricality. I’m sure you could listen to these songs dozens of times and still be peeling apart the layers.

Artist: Galneryus
Song: Beyond of the Ground
From album: The Flag Of Punishment
Genre: Flag Metal
[Buy CD][Website][Song Lyrics]

Any band whose first 3 album titles include the word “Flag” clearly mean business, and Galneryus is no exception. They embody the spirit of heavy metal hyperbole, both in blazing riff and glorious narrative lyric (often made more profoundly enjoyable by virtue of engrish grammar).

The opening melody of this song almost reminds me of a megaman game soundtrack. Flagman’s themesong maybe. And speaking of video game connections, the album art for this and two of their other albums was done by super talented illustrator Yoshitaka Amano, who is probably best known for his highly-recognizable Final Fantasy character designs.

In any case, I think this is a great band to listen to when one is feeling sluggish, or in danger of taking things too seriously.

Said the Gramophone has recently concluded their “Wonderful Video Contest In which people make films for their favourite songs”, and there are some great ones in there.

Yet another fine example of what creative people can do with a little encouragement, some basic equipment, and possibly an all-consuming lust for prizes.

[Link]

“Pika Pika” is a Japanese onomatopoeia with a meaning akin to that of our twinkle, sparkle, or glitter. It has come to be used as a term for a memetic movement of “light doodles” which are spreading around the internet. These are created by using a flashlight or led lightsource to draw images in the air, the trails of which become a single image in long-exposure photographs, and then turning a sequence of these images into an animation.

The Pikapika project started by Tochka, a Japanese creative group, has now collaborated with the Japanese internet company So-Net to create the light-doodle-animation extravaganza that is “PiKA PiKA the Movie”.

The project’s blog on So-Net has quite a few different pikapika videos, including some behind the scenes footage. It’s interesting to see how the seemingly random flashlight wavings of a bunch of people wandering around turns into complex and charming collaborative animations.

Artist: Grammatics
Song: Shadow Committee
From album: Shadow Committee 7″
Genre: Indie Dramapop
[Buy Mp3s][Myspace]

I heard about the band Grammatics from a music recommendation thread on some Japanese site; and this song sort of makes me wonder why I hadn’t heard of them elsewhere first, and how long they will remain unsigned.

This group from Leeds, UK make songs with music more like plot lines than tunes, and both of the specimens on this 2-song album have more than enough creativity and polish to stand out in a crowd.

Artist: Bacon
Song: Bye-Bye Little School Girl
From album: Bacon (Self-titled)
[Buy CD][Bacon’s Website]

Why not make a resolution to help expand the musical horizons of those around you this year? For those of us with friends who are drawn to some of the extremely successful pop punk of recent times, bands like Bacon may be the perfect foot in the door.

These guys in particular have a dynamic delivery and virtually every song bristles with synth-hoisted melodic hooks that will expertly harpoon the involuntary-humming-centers of your brain. This is my favorite song off of their self-titled album of several years ago. Their more recent album “Butterfly” has double its length and number of songs, and a lot more of the same catchy accessible sound and savory name that fans of the genre are almost guaranteed to find appetizing…

I see I haven’t been doing much of the “Exploring the world through sight…” part of our title. So here is some very interesting slice-of-life photography of daily situations in various parts of China complete with captions.

I don’t know about you, but I often get the feeling that we humans experience the world too much through simple recognition and not enough through conscious reflection. Which is to say that every time we see or hear about something that is far enough removed from our daily experience, for example foreign countries or cultures that happen to be thousands of miles away, the information gets cross-referenced against a subconscious database of shallow tidbits –possibly simply a few cliché mental images– which is just enough to provide a basic frame of reference that is suitable for understanding the conversation and moving on.

The problem seems to me to be that without some kind of external impetus or revelation many of us may always see these people and their situations as hazy unrealistic caricatures of reality; and remain unable to sympathize with them or identify with their hardships. When we hear about Asia’s struggle for energy and industrial growth we may simply think of the whole continent as an Asia-shaped piece in an economics board game and forget the human element entirely.

In other words, I think images like these can help inspire us to reflect upon what it means that there are real people out there living these lives today.

The world is an interesting and dynamic place. It’s just hard sometimes to see it past the daily grind, to mentally disembark from our domestic slumber.

[Part 1: Survival][Part 2: Relationships][Part 3: Desires]

Well, happy holidays and new year to everyone. I’ve been using some of my spare time to work on making a new video player that will have a lot of good functionality built in. For example it has a playlist to support multiple videos, and you will be able to copy link code and embed code very easily in order to paste it onto your blog/myspace/website/email/im/whatever in order to share our videos with a wider audience. It even has full-screen mode!

I expect it will be completed in the next month or so, but in case there is anyone reading this who is proficient in Actionscript 2, I would love to get some advice regarding problems I’m having that seem to have no good solution that I can find.

Anyway, here’s looking forward to new developments!