This week seems to be all about the music, so here is Kyary Pamyu Pamyu with her new song Ninja Ri Bang Bang. It is just as kawaii as you would expect, although this time her dancers without faces (why does nobody but Kyary ever have a face in one of her videos?) are animated rather than live action. She performed this live on last week’s episode of Music Station, where it came in ranked number 4 for the week in Japan.
Terrestrial Human
Глюк’oZa has made some excellent animations to go with their high quality music, and I just thought I would share a few more of them with you today. I appreciate the Machinema 3D modeling they do for a bunch of them, while on others they use western animation styles, and still others are done Anime fashion. The fact I enjoy the hell out of her music doesn’t hurt any either.
OK, this one is just downright silly, but has the same cunning as Bernstein’s Peter And The Wolf. Tricking children into becoming music lovers by explaining to them what is going on, or by making sure they get to attend a presentation by a live orchestra. I don’t care which method is used, I enjoy the fact that Wallice and Gromit’s Musical Marvels is helping more and more young people understand and learn to appreciate music.
Truly amazing live music; David Byrne (Talking Heads) and Annie Clark (St. Vincent) did this concert just a few months ago at Strathmore Hall in Rockville, Md, and NPR was there to capture it. Most of this show was from their 2012 album Love This Giant, but they each did a track or two from their previous groups, like Talking Head’s Burning Down the House and St. Vincent’s Marrow.
This is a single instance of the huge collection of concerts and music from around the world that NPR makes available. Today alone, NPR will be doing Nick Cave and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s live from SXSW. Please tell me you are checking these out when they happen, and supporting NPR with whatever resources you have available, so they continue this wonderful work.
A picture I took in London, and then processed a bit. This was a photo of Winchester Cathedral, processed as a watercolor/sketch combination. I obviously need to play with the processing some more to get the setting’s just right to create the image I have in my head, but this isn’t a bad start, all things considered. And it does have the advantage of being something I created and therefore own the rights to, so I can use it in other projects as I see fit. I am going to play with some others to see what I can come up with, and share some of them here.
The obvious choice would be The Incredible Burt Wonderstone this week, with some great comedians doing an excellent job of showing us exactly how professional magicians deal with the real world. The cast for this flic is amazing, I can not imagine the creators getting all these excellent actors assembled for the project if they didn’t have a story worth telling. But it is not the only offering this time around; Vanishing Waves is in very limited release, but it has already won a ton of awards on the Film Festival circuit. It is about making neuro-enhansed real time contact with a coma patient, and exploring all the ways that might go in a non-physical environment. And then there is Noise Matters, which I swear reminds me of nothing so much as the comically brilliant indi film from Sweden, The Sound Of Noise. The core of both films center around people who take what most folks hear as noise, and weave them into complex musical presentations of scope and beauty. Where the films go from that starting point is radically different, but they do seem to share a bit of an attitude no matter how much they diverge.