In Movies we have the somewhat silly The Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, complete with an attack squad of zombie kitty cats. I suppose I should also mention Deathgasm, another horror/comedy but with a heavy metal beat. I think the non-genre Memories of the Sword, a historic fantasy of Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (roughly a thousand years ago), is the best movie bet this time around. I did not see anything genre in TV this week, and Anime only has one new release; Dai-Shogun: Great Revolution. That one is from a parallel universe where giant steam-powered robots fought off the foreign ships, so the 1868 Meiji restoration never happened. Japan is left still fragmented, with various warlords running different areas and the Tokugawa Shogunate fighting internally for control of the fragments.
The animation was created by Janis Skulme for the music video of Olga Korsak’s Behind Closed Doors, and filmed at the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The paintings and statues were brought to life using Crazy Talk 7 and an array of painting, video editing, and compositing software. To give you an idea of what’s involved in a project like this I have included his Video Effects Showreel 2014, which includes a number of instances of the original footage, and the steps they went through on their way to the final product. The fact that the song and performance are so powerful go a long way to making this a memorable video.
Olga Korsak – "Behind closed doors" from Janis Skulme on Vimeo.
The best music of 2015 has to include the Ulfuls, who had several killer releases this year, with Sporty Party at the top of their list. Did I mention that 2015 was the year of One OK Rock, when after a decade of working their collective tails off they finally broke into the US market with a major record label giving them full distribution across North America? They are the last few tracks in today’s group, truly the best new music of the year.
More amazing music that I consider some of the best out of 2015, including Ore Ska Band doing Hands Up Girl back in September (did you know they played Live at Otakon this year?). Next is Wake Up!, an amazing collaboration between Asian Kung-Fu Generation and Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, two of my favorite bands out of Japan, which is why I kept it in even though it happened in 2014. Sense Clown did A-Han this past June, and Singapore’s Indi Fusion group In Each Hand A Cutlass released Satori 101 back in April.
There was a ton of new and amazing music in 2015, like My First Story with Alone and the Wagakki Band with Ikusa. Then there was Superfly with White Light and Passepied with Tokinowa. One of the groups that surprised and delighted me this year was The Full Pledge Munkees, an amazing Ska band out of Singapore, represented here by their song Positif MV. And that really only covered the first 4 months of the year, and didn’t even mention One OK Rock, who finally had their big breakthrough in North America with their release of their first US album this October. Like most such events, their overnight success came after a decade of working their tails off to get there.
Art Rock band The Oral Cigarettes have put together some tasty tunes over the years, so I wanted to share a few of them with you. The first one is their track Hey Kids, which was the 2nd OP song for the anime Noragami Aragoto (the first Noragami OP was Hello Sleepwalkers). The second song is this year’s hit Amy, and the third is 2014s Star Get. I think this band has a lot of promise, and I can’t wait to see where they go from here.