This time a few tracks from the band Androp out of Japan. The first song is One from their third full length album, Period. The other track is Voice from their 3rd single. They have a lot of other good music worth your time to check out.
KMel Robotics has an airborne video recording service as one of the uses for its quadrotor drones, and apparently to showcase that function they programed some of their drones to play the music being recorded. They also had to create some special instruments the drones could play, mostly by modifying existing devices. In this video they play three tunes, Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001 theme), Carroll of the Bells, and the national anthem. They have to have recorded the sound the drone motors and fans make and be electronically subtracting it from the audio track in order to make the music clear, which makes me wonder if they chose the instruments because they were not on the same frequencies as those noises. Thanks to I Programmer for the heads up on this one.
Robots haven’t been the stuff of science fiction as much as part of everyday life for years now, although Almost Human is a favorite show of mine, and still enough in the future to be sci-fi. How mainstream are robots getting? Recently President Obama exchanged bows with a Japanese Robot named ASIMO (just one letter short of Asimov, the sci-fi writer who invented the 3 Laws of Robotics), I think being acknowledged by a head of state counts as mainstream. Pretty much in that same number of days ago, sci-fi author John Scalzi tweeted about how he would like to see Babymetal, a three girl Idol group who sing sweet harmonies with a heavy metal band, tour with Compressorhead as their band. And yes, surprise, Compressorhead is a bunch of robots! I admit, I would pay money to see that show. Who is your favorite robot band?
Arthur Darvill played the part of Rory Williams in Doctor Who, but these days he is starring in a musical in London called Once. Because he wants everyone to know this, he went on BBC1 and sang this rather silly song, using Let It Go for the musical inspiration.
Considering how often she has turned up on the hit Japanese TV show Music Station, I can’t be very surprised about Avril Lavigne’s latest music video Hello Kitty. I was not sure if it was filmed in Japan; that part has now been confirmed. It is kind of refreshing to hear Japanese lyrics in an English language song, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, I can not embed the video into my page for you, it is only available from her web page, linked here.
NOTE: Since that last comment, it has been released in embeddable form. Enjoy. Watch the third video here carefully, and you will see her being given the Hello Kitty guitar she uses in the Hello Kitty music video, when she appeared on a Japanese talk/variety TV show.
I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t appreciate Ghost In The Shell when they meet this unique cyberpunk universe, so instead of ranting about how excellent the series is this time I thought I should just share a few of the recent shorts from GITS: Arise. The first one from The Borderless Project is called Foreseeing 2027, the second is Memory, and the third is Color. There are a few more in this set, all encouraged by Katsuyuki Motohiro, the main director of Psycho-Pass, which owes its existence to the influence of this show.