Preparing my studio this week for new recordings, I rediscovered a lost truth: men are only truly happy when having sex or playing with little electrical boxes, and most happy when the two activities can be combined. (I exclude those men who like sports and wars and hunting and money and stuff like that. They're some kind of troglodyte sub-species, trapped in a Plato's cave of euphemism and metaphor.)
Everything this week conspires to remind me of Box Sex dictum. There are pleasant trips to electronics shops to get the accessories needed to make my new old Apple Performa (thanks,![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
veroniq!) working as an EZ Vision sequencer. There's a first chance to see the new online Kraftwerk documentary Kraftwerk In RAM, in which Wolfgang Flur demonstrates his Super 8 cameras and bake-o-foil percussion pads, and a second chance to see the Erkki Kurenniemi documentary Future Is Not What It Used To Be , followed by a performance at the Berlin Haus der Festspiele by Kurenniemi himself, his DIMI machines, and sombrely comical techno-folk Finns Pan Sonic.
This is an event of stellar fabulousness. The DIMI boxes sound for all the world like menacing, misanthropic, malfunctioning Nintendo Gameboys. The DIMI-S, though, is the star of the show. Assembling around it in a circle, the performers touch it and each other, creating a music of gestures and skin currents. The audience is in fits of laughter as pink and green lights strobe and a rather Austin Powers-like spirit of Reichian techno-sexual liberation floods the room. DIMI-S is the perfect encapsulation of Box Sex dictum. It's a box, and the S stands for 'SEX'. Man's two obsessions: put them together and the result is electrical happiness.
I'm oddly moved by the story of Kohei Minato, who has just invented a small electrical fan which, using magnets rather than an engine, can run on 20% or less of the power required by normal fans. It can also apparently defy physics by outputting more energy than you input to it.
Minato has spent most of his life as a musician. An amateur, he invented the Minato engine fiddling about in his little workshop in Shinjuku, Tokyo's sex district. You see light industrial units like Minato's all over Japanese cities, often on the ground floor of residential houses. Pocket-sized family businesses, they nevertheless supply parts to huge corporations like Toyota. The sound of drills, drones, flailing printing machines, percussive hammering and shrill lathing fills them -- the 'industrial folk music' that Kraftwerk first identified in Dusseldorf and Techno producers later heard in the car plants of Detroit. These sounds haunt my 2003 Tokyo album Oskar Tennis Champion: the title track samples Momoyo Torimitsu's project Made In Sumida, a field study of the little workshops to be found in Asakusa with an accompanying CD of workshop sounds. (There are shades of Alejandra and Areal in Torimitsu's work; more evidence that raw untreated field recordings are somewhere between the new ambient music and the new industrial folk.)
Kohei Minato's invention moves me for several reasons. Its energy-efficiency is moral, elegant and nature-loving. Its startling superiority over all existing fans gives it a 'Man Who Fell To Earth' touch. It came out of a little workshop rather than a big corporate lab, and Minato intends to keep it indie:
'Whereas another inventor might be tempted to outsource everything to a larger corporation, part of what drives Minato is his vision of social justice and responsibility. The 40,000 motors for the convenience store chain are being produced by a group of small manufacturers in Ohta-ku and Bunkyo-ku, in the inner north of Tokyo -- which is becoming a regional rust belt. Minato is seized with the vision of reinvigorating these small workshops that until the 80s were the bedrock of Japan's manufacturing and economic miracle. Their level of expertise will ensure that the quality of the motors will be as good as those from any major company.'
Minato's fans are pure Box Sex, little working ideas with the potential to make the world a better place. I hope what comes out of my own little workshop this year is even .02% as significant.
Everything this week conspires to remind me of Box Sex dictum. There are pleasant trips to electronics shops to get the accessories needed to make my new old Apple Performa (thanks,
veroniq!) working as an EZ Vision sequencer. There's a first chance to see the new online Kraftwerk documentary Kraftwerk In RAM, in which Wolfgang Flur demonstrates his Super 8 cameras and bake-o-foil percussion pads, and a second chance to see the Erkki Kurenniemi documentary Future Is Not What It Used To Be , followed by a performance at the Berlin Haus der Festspiele by Kurenniemi himself, his DIMI machines, and sombrely comical techno-folk Finns Pan Sonic.This is an event of stellar fabulousness. The DIMI boxes sound for all the world like menacing, misanthropic, malfunctioning Nintendo Gameboys. The DIMI-S, though, is the star of the show. Assembling around it in a circle, the performers touch it and each other, creating a music of gestures and skin currents. The audience is in fits of laughter as pink and green lights strobe and a rather Austin Powers-like spirit of Reichian techno-sexual liberation floods the room. DIMI-S is the perfect encapsulation of Box Sex dictum. It's a box, and the S stands for 'SEX'. Man's two obsessions: put them together and the result is electrical happiness.
I'm oddly moved by the story of Kohei Minato, who has just invented a small electrical fan which, using magnets rather than an engine, can run on 20% or less of the power required by normal fans. It can also apparently defy physics by outputting more energy than you input to it.
Minato has spent most of his life as a musician. An amateur, he invented the Minato engine fiddling about in his little workshop in Shinjuku, Tokyo's sex district. You see light industrial units like Minato's all over Japanese cities, often on the ground floor of residential houses. Pocket-sized family businesses, they nevertheless supply parts to huge corporations like Toyota. The sound of drills, drones, flailing printing machines, percussive hammering and shrill lathing fills them -- the 'industrial folk music' that Kraftwerk first identified in Dusseldorf and Techno producers later heard in the car plants of Detroit. These sounds haunt my 2003 Tokyo album Oskar Tennis Champion: the title track samples Momoyo Torimitsu's project Made In Sumida, a field study of the little workshops to be found in Asakusa with an accompanying CD of workshop sounds. (There are shades of Alejandra and Areal in Torimitsu's work; more evidence that raw untreated field recordings are somewhere between the new ambient music and the new industrial folk.)
Kohei Minato's invention moves me for several reasons. Its energy-efficiency is moral, elegant and nature-loving. Its startling superiority over all existing fans gives it a 'Man Who Fell To Earth' touch. It came out of a little workshop rather than a big corporate lab, and Minato intends to keep it indie:
'Whereas another inventor might be tempted to outsource everything to a larger corporation, part of what drives Minato is his vision of social justice and responsibility. The 40,000 motors for the convenience store chain are being produced by a group of small manufacturers in Ohta-ku and Bunkyo-ku, in the inner north of Tokyo -- which is becoming a regional rust belt. Minato is seized with the vision of reinvigorating these small workshops that until the 80s were the bedrock of Japan's manufacturing and economic miracle. Their level of expertise will ensure that the quality of the motors will be as good as those from any major company.'
Minato's fans are pure Box Sex, little working ideas with the potential to make the world a better place. I hope what comes out of my own little workshop this year is even .02% as significant.