SIGGRAPH is going on right now, from August 9th to the 13th, and many of us are missing it. Here are a few videos explaining a couple of the tracks. While it isn’t as good as being there, a number of these individual programs will hopefully be captured and uploaded to their official SIGGRAPH You Tube Channel soon. While we wait for that, enjoy these teasers.
The band is Kankaku Piero (Sense Clown, approximately), and their first album Break came out at the beginning of June. They aren’t as new as that statement might make you think, because they put out 5 mini-albums before this latest release. The first track is A-Han!, new on their first full album. The second song is Mary from their 2013 mini-album, or Mary-san as they say at the beginning, and it was re-released as part of the new full album. Likewise the third song, O P P A I is also both from 2013 and the new album, I am not even going to try to guess what that tune translates into. The final track is 2014’s Japanese-Pop-Music, also on the new album.
The series Rin-Ne is about Sakura, a girl who accidentally crossed into the spirit world as a young child, and ever since she sees all the ghosts around her. It is about Rinne Rokudo, who is one quarter Shinigami, a group of Japanese supernatural creatures occupying the same spiritual niche as the Grim Reaper. Some of them help lost spirits pass on to be reincarnated, while others try to lure people to their deaths. And the show is mostly about all the trouble those two get into any time they are hanging out together. The show started last season, and Crunchyroll is currently simulcasting episode 18, with new episodes airing each Wednesday at 3AM EDT. It is based on the Manga of the same name written and drawn by Rumiko Takahashi, the hardest working, richest and most famous female Mangaka in Japan. Pretty much everything she has ever done has sold millions of copies and been turned into iconic Anime classics. One last detail; the closing theme for the series is the song TOKINOWA by Passepied, one of my favorite art-rock bands from Japan.
Based out of Seattle, Washington, KEXP is public radio at its finest, and tonight we are featuring their presentation of The Dø. The band is percussion driven, but the percussion instruments they are playing are synthesizers controlling MIDI command strings and sample collections, which gives them a rather unique musical flavor. And with songs like Do You Really Want To Go Back In Time? you know I had to include them here. This is one of my favorite US radio stations for listening to great new music and learning about new bands from all over the world, but quite a few of them turn out to be from North America. The Dø is an excellent example of the kind of quality you can hear from this station…
This is the Doctor Who Comic Con 2015 Panel with Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Michelle Gomez, and Steven Moffat, with an intro from Chris Hardwick. Like the last Comic Con panel I posted, this one is also from Flicks And The City. They have a ton more coverage, drop by their web site and watch them all.
A bored Shinigami decides it might be interesting to see what a human would do with his powers, so he drops his instrument of mortality at the feet of Light Yagami to see what happens. Light doesn’t believe the book has the power to kill at first, but as his situation becomes more desperate he finds himself trying it out, in the hopes he might survive after all. That is the setup and premise of Death Note, and the new live action version of the story is streaming on Crunchyroll. It is part of the current summer season of shows from Japan, and is now up to episode three. If you would prefer to watch the original Death Note Anime before starting the live action presentation, it is streaming at Hulu.