The first video by Qooland is called Sea Lice And Bear, more or less. It was posted 3 weeks ago, and is from their upcoming 6-song EP being released on February 12th, called something like Tear Your Classroom To Pieces. Sea Lice is the 5th track on the new EP, while Bear is the 6th, they did a nice job of melding them together. The second track came out almost a year ago on their full album Telecaster so you’ll still play. I have to point out these are my own interpretation’s of the Google Translate results, I don’t read Japanese yet, and still only have between 50 and 100 words of spoken vocabulary, so I have to interpolate a lot. The music is fun, though, and you get some interesting related j-rock results when you plug the band name in over at Last FM.
Another excellent collection of creative software for the artist, animator, movie maker, musician, and publisher built into a Boot-From-DVD Live distro, Ubuntu Studio is ready to help you make some amazing stuff. While they don’t have the huge range of software Open Artist contains, what they do have still covers a lot of ground, and almost all of it is very powerful, stable, intuitive, and user friendly. There is a definite advantage in having access to tools you don’t need to go through a steep learning curve to get a useful result out of, after all.
The workflows they cover are audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing, and within each workflow they include an entire suite of tools for each step of the process. And while I dearly love the large selection of utilities in Open Artist, it can get a bit confusing at times when you just want to crank out your project. It is very nice to have a toolkit available where the best (or at least most commonly used) program for each step is at your fingertips, leaving you no ambiguity about what to launch as you go through creating your masterpiece, in whatever medium.
The latest release is built on Ubuntu 13.10 (Codename: Saucy Salamander), and it has all the latest and greatest updates for all the software. But because it is that new, and not fully vetted for the long haul, it is only supported for the next 4 months. Early adapters will want to go that way, but most folks will probably find the build layered onto Ubuntu 12.04 (Codename: Precise Pangolin), which is supported through 2017, a more reasonable way to go.
Any way you approach this software package, I suspect you will find it a very valuable addition to your creative arsenal. I certainly keep booting the disc over and over and use it to create new things, so I suspect you might find it as interesting after you have seen it a few times.
Another great alt rock band out of Japan is Owarikara, their new single came out in October. I can’t tell you what the names of these tracks are, but I really like them a lot, especially the way they use rhythm and the instrumental melodies. The lead singer definitely adds an edge that wraps the whole package up; now if only I could understand more than one word in three of the lyrics. Of course, I have that same problem with a lot of rock songs sung in English, too.
I recently featured the band Tommy Heavenly6, the punk offering from Tomoko “Tommy” Kawase, this time I am doing Tommy February6, still very rocking but leaning towards trance/electronica. The woman doing the vocals is amazing in any language, and she jumps back and forth between Japanese and English quite a bit. The first track is Runaway, and isn’t the song you were expecting by that title; the second tune is Sugar ♥ Me, while the third is Hot Chocolat.
I Hate Disco… if there was ever a song title made to catch my attention and agree with the band, this is it. The band name is The Telephones, and they have a lot more videos than this link makes you aware of.
Classic Rockabilly with a modern Japanese band, or maybe that is Punk, or perhaps Ska. Or something else; it gets hard to tell after a certain point, but they certainly play with enthusiasm. Myself, I suspect they might be channeling The Ramon’s and the Fine Young Cannibals by way of Chuck Berry and The Beatles. Whatever they are doing, I like it, and hope they do a lot more of it.