Monthly Archives: May 2006

Amino de Kan-pai

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The salaryman life (and for that matter the OL life) is a hard life. Not only he has to work 12h a day 7 days a week but he must party. It means dinner, beer, karaoke, beer, and beer. And back to work the day after. This life style is the reason why you can find so many energy drinks full of cafeine, vitamins and royal jelly. And of course, drinks to get you back on the tracks after a night drinking. Amino de Kan-pai is one of these products, so you can work with 100% efficiency even if you sang Angel of Death all night long with your necktie “`a la Rambo”. And because they want to sell the product, there is a campaign to win bottles of Pommery. So you can quickly test the efficiency of Amino de Kan-pai (Kampai means “Cheers” in Japanese).

Dave Phillips – Japan & Korea Tour

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You can have information about this tour on the Swiss embassy in Japan website. Quite funny to see the flyer of the event at Super Deluxe (the one I did) on this page between information about a Giacometti exhibition and a concert of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich. The persons at Swiss Embassy seem to be open-minded (at least the ones at the Cultural Section), not like the French. You can’t even put flyers for a French band touring in Japan at the Institut Franco-Japonais ! Of course, the Swiss government is sponsoring the tour, so they don’ t have the choice. But try to to get a grant from the French government as a noise musician !

8bits

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Yesterday evening started with a live at Fourth Floor in Kichijouji, The International Chiptune Resistance World Tour 2006. It was really great (especially Nullsleep) and it was funny to be in an audience of otaku and geeks. I feel like I want one of these old Game Boy ! I forgot my camera so no pictures… Sorry.

After that it was a friend’s birthday party. Miou and me made a Domo-cake and someone else did a great Domo-kun mask.

Nippon a Gogo

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If you are at Paris or plan to be at Paris in June, you won’ t have much time for visiting the Louvre and the places where Da Vinci Code was shoot and J.-P. Marielle ran to death. Nippon a Gogo will keep you busy.
My personal advices are : Doravideo, Optrum, Guilty Connector, Applehead, Kishino-san (in fact all the “New Techno Pop Party” at Point FMR). I won’ t be able to go there but Miou will be there and propose a workshop “petite pisseuse” (customization of small plush dolls).
I wanted to do something, so I started my own customization of a plush doll, fx.stilte style: “poupée de son, poupée de noise”. I’ll try to provide some funny and simple electric circuits (“Led’s be crazy” series) that can be used for the “petite pisseuse” workshop.
My “poupée de son, poupée de noise” is almost finished and here are some pictures of the work in progress. May be “Angel of Noise” would be a better name. Any suggestions ?

Front view (with the speaker head, the picture would be better with a dark background):

Rear view (with the wires wings):

Detail of the “Selector of Death”:

Detail of the “Master of Puppet” (without the master…) and the wires wings:

Detail of the “Master of Puppet” (with the master!) and the wires wings:

By playing with the Selector of Death and touching the wings tips, moving close to the wings or directly touching the Master of Puppet (how dare you !), different types of sounds are produced.
I think the doll won’t change a lot more. I like the idea of wires wings and all these wires around the body. There is something chirurgical and bondage at the same time.

No Yakitori

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I like yakitori but I like Merzbow too, how to do ?
On 13 May, the Uplink Market has opened at Parco in Shibuya. It will remain open until 30 June. You can find a selection of articles by Uplink.
Recently, they installed a Merzbow Corner. The blog entry on Uplink website says that you can find rare and analog records of Merzbow. There is a box too (4 CDs + DVD + T-shirt) entitled “Turmeric / Special Edition Lunch Box”. Only 10 boxes are available for Japan ! I don’ t know the price and I’ll try to check it as soon as possible, but I guess it will be too expensive for me (if it is not sold out).

Electrofringe

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You have one week left to submit something at Electrofringe 2006, a New Media Art Festival. It will be hold in Australia and looks quite interesting.
The submission is only a 250 words text to submit online. If I can find an idea and then realize it before the end of September, I’ll submit something. To be honest, the realization might be the most difficult part as I already have some ideas. But with my work, it is difficult to find free time for building weird effects. Moreover I can’t do that as part of my research work, my boss would kill me.
But some days of holidays in Australia making and listening to strange sounds is appealing.

Bicycles Crush

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Every year, at the University of Tokyo, the administration of the University puts notices on all bicycle. Then after one month, all the bicycles that still have the notice are discarded. Basically, it’s not a bad idea to remove all the unused bicycles (and there are a lot of them !). But rather than checking if they have been reported stolen (there is a mandatory number on each bicycle that proves it is registred), or just take them somewhere for recycling them (by selling them in a second hand shop or just giving them to people/countries that would be happy with them), a truck comes and crushes them all. It is really absurd as most of these bicycles are far from being junk. Of course, because it is a yearly process, so no bicycle can be left for more than one year. It means that they are destroying nice bicycles just for the sake of destroying them. To be honest, the University of Tokyo has a serious problem with space. They even have to build new buildings literally over the old ones. But still, it is just plain absurd to do that without even trying to find a more suitable solution.
In fact, it is quite the same with computers. When a computer is getting old (according to Japanese standards), it is thrown away and a new one is bought. Of course, some students keep the best parts of the computers that are thrown away but it would be better to have a true recycling program so that people/countries in need for such material could benefit of it. Japan is consumers paradise.

Un Homme Ne Peut Endurer Ça

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That’s the title (french version that I helped to translate) of the new movie of Mitsuo Shindo with Takenaka Naoto, Suzuki Kyouka and a lot of people.
I had an invitation for today’s preview screening but because of my work I unfortunately couldn’t go.
Miou went and found the movie great as well as the soundtrack (some musicians make appearance in the movie that is clearly the work of someone who loves music). She took some pictures too. So here you are:

Now I have to wait until this summer to see it when it will be released.

Japanese Dutch Wife

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I don’t know how it is in other countries but in Japan, Dutch Wifes or Sexual Dolls is a very serious business. Japan is the country of hobbyists and sexual dolls have magazines (for example, i-doloid petie) devoted to them, shops, companies (Trottla, Orient Doll), delivery service, rental shops, love hotels / cafe with dolls, …

May be to have a Dutch Wife is not so strange or uncommon, but in Japan, the strangest and sometimes very disturbing fact is that a lot of these dolls look like children or manga characters. So looking inside a magazine such as i-doloid petie is a really weird trip in the world of dolls otaku.
Like any fan magazine dedicated to a very precise subject, i-doloid petie is full of pictures, interviews, reports, advices, DIY sexual toys, places to go, books and DVD reviews…
But what is quite surprising is the high quality of the magazine. The pictures are really good and there is even some digital that is very impressive (mixing a doll body with a real model head for a very disturbing result). In fact, the dolls are sometimes incredibly well made and it is hard to tell if it is art or just a sexual toy.
But the most funny part is the DIY sex toys. One is about how to convert a mixer into a sex toy (the name is great: GuWOOO (Gushing Water Operating Onaning Object)) and another gives the schematics for building a home-made vibrator.

Some other pictures from i-doloid petie #6 (even if they are only dolls, it’s much more hardcore and disturbing than the pictures I put here).

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The Pocky Game

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It’s a long time since I didn’t post a movie from Japanese TV. I must admit that it’s a long time since I’ve watched Japanese TV.
If you like stupid Japanese TV programs, you can find a lot on YouTube, so I hope this one is not already on it (I’m too lazy to check).
Yesterday, the TV was tuned on V-Theater 135 (a satellite channel that broadcasts pinku movies and idoru programs) and I saw this quite interesting program and recorded part of it. Here are three video extracts (divx, around 4Mo each)) of the same program:

The Pocky Game (Round 1)
The Ice Cream Game
The Pocky Game (Round 2)

If you don’t know what is a pocky, you will understand quickly. As for the rules of this game (round 2 is easier for understanding the rules as it is complete unlike round 1). The Ice Cream is easy to understand too.

Email not working

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My email is down…
I don’t know why so please wait until it’s repaired (my host is in France, so it won’t be done today as it is Sunday).
I’ll reply as soon as it is back (I think the emails won’t be lost just delayed). If you think I didn’t receive it, send it again when it’s repaired (I’ll leave a message here).

Background Noise #5

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Le voici enfin !
Lien direct (attention, le fichier fait dans les 23Mo). Sinon, lien RSS (lisible avec iTunes). Ou encore Odeo (quand la page sera enfin actualisée).

1. Japanese Music & Cinema
1.1. Tani Naomi: Shouwa Karesusuki (Room of Agony) – Tiliqua Records
1.2. Tani Naomi: Meiji Ichidai Onna (Room of Agony) – Tiliqua Records
1.3. Kaji Meiko: Kyou no Wagami ha (Kyou no Wagami ha) – Ultra Enka vol. 9

2. Tokyo Sound series
2.1. Takagi Takeshi: Tokyo A Gogo – Japanese Psychedelic and Punk 65-71

3. Noise
3.1. Guilty Connector and Tabata: Trance Oscillation from Limbo (Six Doors) – Housepig Records
3.2. Bastard Noise: Flesh Near Automation (Six Doors) – Housepig Records
3.3. Sky Burial: Awakening from Someone Else’s Dream – Housepig Records

Hatsukoi (First Love)

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This new movie with Miyazaki Aoi will be released in Japan on 10 June.
May be some of you know this cover of an album of Zunou Keisatsu (Brain Police):


This is a picture (not a real one but made from the testimony of witnesses) of a man masquerading as a motorcycle cop who stole 300 millions yen in 1968 (the biggest robbery in Japan ever). The money has never been recovered and the identity of the theft is still a mystery.
Hatsukoi is a fiction about this story, trying to recreate what really happened on this 10 December 1968.

????(tachimi)

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We could finally watch Broken Flowers. We tried earlier this week but it was so crowded that the only option was to see it standing. In Japanese, it is called tachimi. This word is composed of two verbs, “to stand”  and “to watch”. It happens sometimes for not so big movies that are shown in small theaters but attract a quite large audience. It is strange that theaters are allowed to have people standing in a crowded theater. If they are not so concerned about safety, they should remove these big luminous exit signs that are sometimes very annoying.

Minoru Kawasaki has found a gold mine. Movies with an animal hero. After The Calamari Wrestler and Executive Koala, he’s back with a new movie called The Crab Goal Keeper (This year is the year of the Soccer World Cup). Nothing new, but there are some nice appearance such as Naoto Takenaka and Hitoshi Ozawa.

Kishino You-Ichi @ Club Goodman

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Some pictures of the Watts Towers / Kishino-san gig at Club Goodman in Akihabara.
There was a lot of people both in the audience and on stage. Before the live of Kishino-san who played with artists such as Itoken and Jon as Watts Towers, I could discover a cute duo from Nagoya called Lullatone. No pics of Lullatone because we were late and it was crowded…
Kishino-san will tour in France in June.

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