Psychedelaware

[imomus]

I'm staying alone in a borrowed apartment in Nishi Ogikubo, West Tokyo. It's early morning and sunshine is making the curtains a big block of diffused white light. I'm playing The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour album and actually remembering what it felt like to be in Britain in 1967 (I'm old enough to remember that!) but also what it felt like to be in Tokyo in 1997, because this weird, genre-colliding psychedelic brass band music was very much in the air here then too. The LSD referenced in the album's lyrics may have helped The Beatles to achieve the rich disorientation and decontextualisation you hear in songs like I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever, but I sometimes think Tokyo doesn't need to do LSD: like Obelix from the Asterix books, the city seems to have been dipped in a vat of the stuff at birth. Everything here is wonderfully out of context, suffused with the same gentle, positive sense of whimsy that seeps from these songs.



My favourite recent echo of this atmosphere--one which, unlike, say, Oasis, actually matches The Beatles' radicalism and originality--also qualifies as my favourite song released in 2004. It appeared outside the confines of the music industry and has remained untrumpeted, unhyped, and unheralded. It's a song by the design group Delaware. It's called Graphic Designin' in the Rain (they made a book with a similar title) and I grabbed this version from a Flash animation they did for the Shift website. The IdN DVD I bought on Thursday includes a live rendition of the song in Singapore. The studio version is better, a taut, simple arrangement which manages to recall George Martin's elaborate productions using nothing more than a simple synthesised voice for backing. I'm sure Delaware won't mind if I make it available to you here:

Graphic Designin' in the Rain (stereo mp3 file, 1.6MB)

Comments

[thetemplekeeper.livejournal.com]

I very much enjoy the idea that Obelix fell into a vat of LSD at birth - and your metaphor of mental disorientation as a magic potion is lovely. Just bought Otto Spooky and am very impressed with it - thank you (and to the anonymous poster who suggested I go to Selectadisk on Berwick Street - thank you very much, too)!

I will post a fuller "review" of Otto as an appendage to your earlier entry when I hvae listened to it a few more times. I must say that I found Cockle Pickers really moving (I thought it made the whole Morecombe Bay tragedy newly vivid), and the seeming reversal of the normal use of a Brechtian alienation technique to criticise communist China as well as Western economic exploitation was a lovely and clever irony.

Thank you!

[seanthesean.livejournal.com]

ha ha. you win with the asterix & obelix reference...
"you should never let tokyo near lsd, you don't know what would happen to them! perhaps they'd become NORMAL." I would add that the Magical Mystery Tour album always made me feel a bit ill... maybe it was the book that came with the album... anyhow. also, take a look at this.
http://www.jetlagtravel.com/molvania/video_large_2.html
It's a bit like Laibach + Animotion + Rollie Fingers
The website it's from is a fake tour guide promo site. great stuff.
http://www.jetlagtravel.com/

Again with the Whimsy!

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

"Everything here is wonderfully out of context, suffused with the same gentle, positive sense of whimsy that seeps from these songs."

Ah, but I love him too.

[oracolodeifont.livejournal.com]

the song reminds me of some beatles' song too. i suspect that audio compression and the somewhat naive use of sampler create a warm mellotron-like sound, like the 'flutes' in strawberry fields.

[jennvix.livejournal.com]

That is my fave Beatles album.

[i-am-a-wallet.livejournal.com]

Oh when are we going to see a brass revolution? Imagine a brass band electronic soundscape. It's time that somebody bought yorkshire computers.

[(Anonymous)]

I had the pleasure of meeting Delaware at the AGIdeas conference last year, where they played at the beginning of each day, and had a talk on the last day (from memory). The night after the conference they did a DJ set in a small nightclub in Melbourne, and were extremely friendly and open about their music and their design work. Certainly a highlight of the conference for me.

http://195.230.55.9/pix/c19658258fcc5b5f/UL_806025_10839146882_x.jpg
http://195.230.55.9/pix/c19658258fcc5b5f/UL_806025_10839146861_x.jpg
(god I looked ridiculous back then with that long hair.... *shudder*)

katamari damacy

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, have you heard the soundtrack for Katamari Damacy? It's a wonderful game for the Playstation 2, and it's the most immediately similar music to this song (because several of the songs use these same synth voices, and are about rolling giant sticky balls arround). No end of thanks to Digiki for ftping it to me.