This will only be running until Friday or so, but it is amazing. The singer is Beatie Wolfe, and the presentation is best viewed with your VR headset on. This augmented reality experience is in a 360 degree virtual environment, with the visual component changing with each repetition of her new album Raw Space. She created this in collaboration with interactive creative firm Design I/O and the famous engineering team from Nokia Bell Labs. You can get a lot more detail about this unique performance directly from the You Tube Live page, and get counted as a viewer in the process.
I know I featured DAOKO recently (on March 18th in fact), but she has posted another excellent track earlier this week so I had to include it here. In the five days since it went online, Dear Sir, Goodbye, Good Bye has racked up over 200,000 views. I also included her 2015 song Mercury, just because.
They sounded so good the first time (if you missed it, scroll back three posts and enjoy some more great tunes from them) I had to add a few more from The Winking Owl. The first one is 2015’s Here For You off of their EP Open Up My Heart, the second is 2016s Bloom, and the third is Stars from their 2014 mini album Supernova.
The Winking Owl have a new mini-album coming out in another two weeks called Into Another World, and the first track here is also the first song on it: Now What?. After that is their 2015 debut EP Open Up My Heart, and we finish with my favorite track from their 2016 first full album This Is How We Riot. Luiza’s voice has range and power as she switches effortlessly between Japanese and English, showing off her European/Asian heritage. The band’s music is tight, focused and very well produced, and with their record deal with Warner Japan they are finally getting the exposure they deserve. I have found CDs released by them going back to 2010, so I am pretty sure the phrases Debut EP and first full album refer to their current record contract, and not their actual musical career.
It has been a while since we posted our last OreSka Band, and they have some great new tunes worth sharing. All of these are from their 3rd Full Album Slogan, which was released November 23rd, 2016. The first track is Free Now posted last November, the second is !Fiebre! from last May and pretty much the best example of Japanese Samba Ska I have ever heard, the third is NEXSPOT and includes a slice of Jazz I wasn’t expecting from them. This band has been growing into their talent nicely, with each album better than the one before.
The videos of KYARY PAMYU PAMYU’s music have always been some of the most surreal footage coming out of Japan, but her latest seems to be somewhere between the Wizard of Oz and Plan 9 From Outer Space, with a cast of munchkins played by Easter eggs. The track is, appropriately, called Easta, which is Japanese for Good, and I can’t help but feel there is a bit of a second language pun going on there. The new single (which has 5 tracks on it, but tow of them are just instrumental versions of two of the others) is her 14th, and was released this past week on the 5th. At the same time, she also released her KPP 5 Years Monster World Tour 2016 DVD, filmed at the final performance of the tour at Budokan. Here’s the bit I find really interesting; folks picking up the limited edition version of the disc get a VR headset included with it, so they can get the full 360 degree immersive effect of the concert. That’s right, they filmed a VR version of the show, and put it on disc.