Category: Music

Waving as I pass by

Life is complicated these days, and anime is low priority. I’ve heard good things about Kimi ni Todoke — I gather that the protagonist is Aspie-ish, which could be interesting, handled well — and I plan to download it when I see a batch torrent. Otherwise, though, nothing else recent looks worth the time.

A few random notes:

Via Pete, here’s a look at a deluxe Russian edition of Haibane Renmei.

Many in the otakusphere have been writing about the decade in anime. Uh, guys, you’re jumping the gun. Just as 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, 2010 is the tenth year of the first decade of the no-longer-new century, not the first of the second decade.

Disappointing musical news: Kayo is leaving Polysics. The band apparently will continue to tour and record, but it won’t be the same without her robotic persona and bleepy synths. Who else can possibly shake the pompons in “Peach Pie on the Beach”?

I bought myself a Christmas present, the basic edition of Filter Forge. It’s something like Reaktor for graphic artists: you can download thousands of filters made by other users, or you can roll your own from the tools provided (if you get a fuller version). There are a couple of examples below the fold. Warning: they’re based on a snapshot of myself, and I am not cute. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them.

Continue reading “Waving as I pass by”

The best soundtrack, and a new poll

I doubt that anyone will be surprised by the first-place winner in the best anime soundtrack poll. Cowboy Bebop received more votes than the second- and third-place winners combined. I had expected that Noir would take second, but it was eventually overtaken by FLCL and Death Note. Here’s the top ten:

1. Cowboy Bebop (18.0%)
2. FLCL (8.0%)
3. Death Note (7.0%)
4. Noir (7.0%)
5. .hack//SIGN (6.0%)
5. Vision of Escaflowne (6.0%)
7. Lucky Star (5.0%)
8. Haibane Renmei (5.0%)
8. Macross Frontier (5.0%)
10. Mushishi (5.0%)

The other nominees were Ghost in the Shell SAC (4.0%); Princess Mononoke (4.0%); Azumanga Daioh (4.0%); Aria (3.0%); Code Geass/R2 (3.0%); Neon Genesis Evangelion (2.0%); Simoun (2.0%); ef: a tale of memories (2.0%); The Twelve Kingdoms (2.0%); Mai-HiME (1.0%); and, Last Exile (0.0%)

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So, who’s the worst character in anime? I changed the question to “most annoying” in the poll widget to make it clear that I’m looking for the most poorly conceived, pointlessly irritating or useless character, not the most evil. I added a couple more candidates whom I think should have been nominated, and I changed the representative of Sailor Moon to ChibiUsa, whom I had forgotten about.

Hate crime?

Some Roman Catholic churchmen, meanwhile, have said that the words “hokey pokey” derive from “hocus pocus” — the Oxford English Dictionary concurs — and that the song was written by 18th-century Puritans to mock the language of the Latin Mass. Last year the Catholic Church in Scotland, concerned that some soccer fans were using the song as a taunt, raised the possibility that singing it should be prosecuted as a hate crime.

I suppose I should take umbrage at Focus, too.

Dreaming meat

Not anime, but of interest to science-fiction and music fans: Frëd Himebaugh of the Fredösphere has composed a fifteen-minute opera using Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out of Meat” as the libretto. You can purchase it here for 89¢. See also Frëd’s earlier posts here and here.

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In case there’s anyone who hasn’t yet seen it, here’s the best Touhou video I’ve seen in a while:

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Catholic News Service apparently didn’t think to google the name they chose for their multimedia service.

Meat dreams

Frëd Himebaugh of the Fredösphere has composed a fifteen-minute opera using Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out of Meat” as the libretto. You can purchase it here. See also Frëd’s earlier posts here and here.

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Here’s one of the more impressive videos I’ve seen recently. The characters and tune are from the vast Touhou project, but you don’t need to know anything about that to appreciate the phantasmagorical transformations.

Cultural notes

I spent most of the weekend at the Walnut Valley Festival. It’s primarily devoted to acoustic string music, particularly bluegrass, but there were some items of interest to students of Japanese popular culture.

• The second-place winner in the fingerpicking championship was Akihiro Tanaka, from Kyoto, Japan. I wasn’t able to get down to Winfield on Thursday, when the contest was held, but the fingerpick winners made an appearance on the main stage Friday evening. Here’s what Tanaka played then: ((The sound is less than wonderful. Stage one is a noisy place.))

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/My Favorite Things.mp3]


• I spent several hours listening to the jam sessions at Carp Camp. ((I don’t bring my dulcimer to Winfield unless I’m camping. This year I day-tripped, so I just listened.)) Here’s the tune that the campers call “Finish (sic) Polka.” It sounds strangely familiar.

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/finnish polka.mp3]

(This is not my recording, but Carp Camp’s own from last year. The campers played the tune at least twice this weekend, but neither time did I have my recorder handy.)

• One of this year’s Carp Camp catchphrases (if you write it as a single word, you get six consecutive consonants. Can you think of any other English words like that?) was “Don’t hurt the old people.” The third Monday in September (usually the day after Winfield), is celebrated in the Japan as Respect for the Aged Day.

Old-time cooking

My vacation last week started disastrously (see below), but once I arrived at my friends’ home it improved markedly. One of the highlights was an impromptu jam session with the young fiddler Roger and a couple of his friends. I just happened to have my little portable recorder at hand.

Different instruments require different micing techniques. Fiddles, I’ve read, sound best with the microphone positioned two or three feet above the fiddle. With banjos, the further from the microphone, the better — in the next room, say, or across the street, or in the next county.

Old Mother Logo:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Old Mother Logo.mp3]

Cluck Old Hen:

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Cluck Old Hen.mp3]

Update: Here’s Roger in action at a contra dance:

Public service announcement

Here’s the story.

This tune is part of a long tradition in music. An earlier example is No Strings Attached’s “Broken Key Boogie,” which commemorates modifications to Randy Marchany’s keyboard made by another airline (TWA, if I remember correctly).

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/Broken Key Boogie.mp3]

Are you a twit?

Do you tweet? Are your thoughts expressible in no more than 140 characters? Perhaps you should reconsider. Here are a variety of philosophical arguments against using Twitter. For instance:

Natural Law Argument
(1) It is wrong to do what is not natural.
(2) There is nothing remotely natural about broadcasting the minutiae of your life to all and sundry whenever it takes your fancy.
(3) Therefore, Twittering is wrong.

(Via First Things.)

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A useful term:

A related concept is heiwa-boke (hei-WA boh-keh), literally meaning “numbed from too much peace,” which describes the state of literally being made stupid by living in a country that’s overly harmonious, like the Japanese who traveled to Iraq in 2004 to help rebuild the country only to be promptly kidnapped because, well, they were in friggin’ Iraq.

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A piece on the Montreaux jazz festival included this note about an unlikely pairing:

The pair [Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock] ended with Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 — which Lang Lang says inspired him when he heard it in a Tom & Jerry cartoon at 2 years old.

Here’s that cartoon, a classic combination of music and violence. The pianist you hear is likely Shura Cherkassky.