Aw dang....wait, massively glorious win

So my day started out with me discovering that, just as I had suspected, The Pillows were sold out for their concert on Saturday. I wandered to Shibuya kind of depressed. I then proceeded to have soft serve and go to Tower records to cheer myself up. I got a huge list of new Japanese Indies and some of it I really liked. There was a pretty big selection of J-punk and J-hip hop and I also finally started to take a look at the J-Club scene. I don't really know too much about it, but there was a DVD of this one band called Soft playing in a loop in the store. It seems like a kind of jazzy/fusion jam kind of music with big ensembles. I will have to look into it further.

http://www.myspace.com/softribe

However, the night took a surprisingly amazing turn when I went to one of the coolest concerts I have ever been to in my life. The club was called eM7 and right when I walked in I knew I was in the right place. I was surrounded by people who I could only describe as "not meant for life during daylight." There were Dreadlocks a plenty, people in leather, and every other sign of a good crowd in my opinion.


Drums Drums Drums. That was the name of the game this evening. I walk in and I see a man alone on stage with just a drum kit and some monitor speakers. He explodes into a furious drum solo synced up with insane free jazz horn parts. Everything he played went along perfectly with the articulation of the instruments in the accompanying track...for 20 minutes straight. The artist goes by Ruins-Alone. What really did it for me in his set was his energy and his falsetto.


Now my mind was in a very interesting place after what I had just seen, so I was no where near ready for what was next. I looked up and found myself surrounded by drums. Three kits all with entirely different cymbals, toms, everything. The only thing they all had in common was a glowing bass drum that pulsed when hit. The group was called Drumno and they blew me away. Drumno writes spatial compositions. You stand in the center of the room and you hear as drum hits circle around you in opposite directions. The complexities of the beats were only matched by what your mind was doing to try to sort what was coming from where. When the bass drums came in it was over. The whole crowd fell into a tribal frenzy, wailing after every break in the song. I won't post a link, because recorded media does not give justice to the effect this group had live.


So what could possibly follow that? How about ELEKTRO HUMANGEL. A four piece noise explosion is the phrase that comes to mind. Three percussionist: A kit player with hair like Confucius, a woman who was obviously a trained Taiko drummer by her form, and a dreadlocked mad man who destroyed his kit and had a solo section that consisted of him dropping his cymbal onto his floor tom and seeing what would happen. The leader of the group though was a synth player who literally played noise in the most surreal ways imaginable. He was a master of throwing the back of his hand onto 5 or so adjacent keys, layering on all kinds of effects, and using the pitch bend like I have never seen it used before. Then he put a microphone into his mouth and did the same things to his voice. I was shocked by what I was hearing, and by how much I loved it.

Here is the myspace link. I recommend the videos, but overall you need to be "in it deep" (do I mean a little insane?) to enjoy it. http://www.myspace.com/elektrohumangel