I've enjoyed a very low-key birthday this year (But thanks to everyone who remembered me!). Couldn't be assed with everyone fussing or having a big bash in town so I spent the day at work, and then relaxed at home by myself with good food - Mediterranean vegetable pizza - and a bottle of wine. But I think my friend Debs felt a bit sorry for me so she arranged a geek evening for the night after. Sadly, one of the other invitees had to drop out - her partner wasn't feeling very well - so it ended up just Debs and I. This was no bad thing in my book, as Debs and I never seem to get much time to spend with each other.
Debs - a.k.a the FlakMonkey - is a great cook, much like her sister, Sarah, and plied me with all manner of exotic goodies, including a green pea humous mixed with lemon juice and tahini (which I'd never even heard of until she asked me to pick some up for her) and what we could only describe as 'Korma Soup'. She'd seen the recipe in the local newspaper and committed it to memory; onions, sweet potatoes, coconut milk and curry powder of some description. It really did taste like my favourite korma dish...but as a soup! Yum!
Oh, and she also baked a lovely banana and chocolate cake for me which was delicious.
After that we played a game of Hnefetafl - 'Kings Table' to you and me - and then spent the rest of the night (and most of the next morning!) sat next to her laptop playing tunes for each other on Youtube. It was a fantastic night full of laughter and the simple pleasures of singing/bopping along to some of your most beloved tunes...
...including this gloriously filthy techno number from Benny Benassi that I'd never heard before: 'Who's your daddy?' (WARNING: NOT Suitable for work! )
Debs and I both adore a wide range of tuneful, bangin' techno so this went down an absolute treat. Jeez-o, how good is this video??! Sigh...
On Tuesday night the Music Hall in Aberdeen’s city centre reverberated to the rhythmic hammering of stick upon skin as Japan’s Yamato Drummers lit up the stage with a festival of music, choreography, humour and theatrics.
For such a simple object, the Yamato troupe revealed a surprising complexity in the way a drum/gong/cymbal could be used. Drums of all sizes, beats of all strengths, and presentation ranging from brooding to melodic, from displays of sheer poetry to crowd-pleasing interactive ribaldries.
It was all in the timing.
Mainstream drumming, in the Western sense, portrays drummers as stool-bound components in a much larger group of instruments, solid backbones of the musical body. But Western drummers are rarely heard discussed in the same tones of reverence as guitarists are; my music-teaching friend likes to tell the following joke, no doubt referring to the many prospective rock drummers he’s had the pleasure of sending out into the world:
Q) What has three legs and a cunt*? A) A drum stool!
Japanese drumming, as you might have guessed from the nation that brought us Karate, is a much more lively affair. Even raising and lowering the drumstick affords the opportunity for the drummer to dance, to pose, to spin, and to generally use their whole posture as an artistic accroutrement to his or her music. As such, in the first half the 9 or 10 drummers presented were dressed very much as they would to any acrobatic display: perhaps in Imperial Japan drummers needed the freedom of movement to defend themselves from attacking Samurai at a moment’s notice. And by the prominence of the well-honed shoulder and arm muscles on display, each person on stage, wether male or female, could be relied upon to defend Imperial honour to the Emperor’s full satisfaction.
In drumming, rhythm is everything: it may as well be called ‘hitting’ otherwise. But more than in just their fantastic musical performances, the Yamato group succeeded in creating a rhythm between their members. Even when portraying a clash of styles – Men vs Women, Master Vs Student – the participants were supremely choreographed. As one arm fell, another raised in perfect counterpoint. Rarely do Aberdonians get to see bodily movement as precisely calibrated as this (Particularly not at weekends ).
But perhaps the true genius of the Yamato performance was to keep the audience interested; after a time even the best drumming performances can blend together – akin to painting in only the colour orange. There are only so many tricks you can play before people naturally succumb to boredom and want to see blue, or green. Therefore, fully cognizant of this, a slow track would precede a vibrant, energetic tour-de-force, and strategic use was made of crowd-pleasing hanging drums as large across the diameter as the person hitting it. And solemn musical displays – endlessly impressive - would give way to jokey little skits requiring audience participation.
In the first memorable instance, one of the troupe – the ‘cheeky’ one (following templates clearly laid out for characters in Japanese Animation) – set up a simple Simon Says game for the audience, testing us to repeat an increasingly complicated series of beats, with the obligatory attempts to deceive us. We clapped, we laughed, we were surprisingly good, managing feats of co-ordination that would have made our school music teachers beam with pride. However, in the second half, after a half hour break and a costume change into some gorgeous, full-length, red silk outfits, they went one better. This time around, with the co-operation of the full troupe in accompaniment, the same cheeky chap turned us into part of the orchestra.
After again teaching us a few simple rhythms – and how long he wanted each beat to be, via the comedy device of an ‘inept’ member of the band – he then integrated us into a full-length performance, conducting between three groups of drummers...and the thrilled audience. Again, we rose magnificently to the occasion. 400 people not only clapped in near-perfect synchronicity, we even kept up when our conductor mischievously changed the rhythm on us - a blindingly quick change from four beats down to two!
After that, a standing ovation was the very least we could offer by way of gratitude, and we did, although after all that sustained clapping our hands were really warm with throbbing and were turning red in a few cases!
There’s so much to tell, so much I sadly haven’t got room for here – you absolutely have to experience this for yourselves if you ever get the chance. For an hour and a half we were transported wholesale into another culture, and welcomed into it like Kings. Being live, the drumming was felt in our bones and stomachs, as well as in our hearts and souls (Late on there was some singing that brought emotional lumps to throats all round the theatre). If you fancy something different from the endless obsession with cinema or concert-going, you could do far worse than see this show.
Thanks to my lovely friend Debs randomly phoning me last Friday, I am now going to Aberdeen’s fine Music Hall to see The Yamato Drummers of Japan with her and her friend, Daisy:
Of all the musical instruments out there, I’ve tried to play only a few – (Chanter/Bagpipes, Piano, recorder...I’m Gemini so tend to get bored of things very easily) but I’ve only ever enjoyed one. Drums. I love drums. I love a good thumping beat, and I love it even more from a live instrument; you need the fresh sonic veracity of a heavy baton striking stretched drum-skin to truly appreciate what a wonderfully primal and sexy instrument a drum can be.
I’m really looking forward to this. I’ll be sure to return here to froth over how good it was, assuming I’ve not been rendered unconscious by an enormous sub-sonic drum shockwave (apparently there are biiiig drums in the show).
Run Rabbit Junk, an awesome piece of background music from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. This next piece is the sublime title theme from the show, entitled Inner Universe. I've rarely heard such beautiful choral female melodies...made even better, IMHO, by fact she's singing in Japanese and I can't understand a word! Enjoy!
Been a while since I posted any music. This is an exceptional piece of background music from the Anime series, Hellsing, entitled 'Shi~kuretto karuma serenade'.
Subtle, evocative, primal, mysterious...and just a little bit Latino. I'm currently obsessing over that rythmic back-beat; it's gorgeous. I hope you enjoy it too.
Last weekend, during my crazed Haggis/Jaffa cake/Pringle/wine binge (Geek Night), I was introduced to Goldfrapp's 2003 album, Black Cherry. It came up in conversation as a perfect album to make love to, by a very charming, newly-married lesbian geek, and came highly recommended. Laura just so happened to have brought along her copy, too, and having then been caressed by Ms Goldfrapp's aural attentions I could not help but agree (Which might just explain why I - the renowned non-smoker of legend - was smoking cigarettes that night! )
Anyway, having been bitten I seem to have become smitten with Goldfrapp (), playing Black Cherry so often that after a few days even I began to tire of it and wondered what their other albums were like. Being a profoundly 21st century boy, I turned immediately to Bittorrent, and soon had five of their albums to play with. Oh sorry, six, but how can an album purely composed of remixes be called a proper album?
Which brings me to the point of this tale - Granty has suckered you in with talk of sex music specifically so he could have an audience of greater than one (himself) for a mini-rant.
Remixes. Oh, how I wish I could stuff each and every remixed song back up the rectal cavities of the 'artists' who made them! They're not artists, they're engineers. Or, as I call them, 'Talentless cockroaches who live off the talent of others'. I wouldn't mind them so much if they at least improved or added-something to the song they re-mixed, but in nigh-on every single case I've ever come across the effect has been detrimental (I think the dance-version of Tori Amos' Professional Widow was an improvement, but that's not saying much). Once contemplative melodies have been shoe-horned into faster tempo's and ruined with artless, machine-spewed accompaniaments and melodies that just plain crap all over the original artist's hard work. I don't understand why proper bands and artists allow it; they sit down and write songs of whatever length, spending months perfecting each bar, each note, each lyric..and upon release some twat with a digital keyboard and sample machine buggers about it with for a couple of days and then injects it into the doped-up minds of the uber-cretins inhabiting club-land, to some kind of acclaim that means he gets to do it further down the line to somebody else.
Feel free to disagree with me, but also feel free to suffer my scorn and bitter disapproval of everything you are *shakes fist*. On the other hand, if you want to suggest any songs or albums you know of that provide a good background to a spot of sweet lovin', I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts on the matter...?
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WIDGETIZE