Scraposterous | 網中人

Inside Air's Atlas studio in Paris

Album art

                                       

Jorge Verdin – Tremolo Audio

The multi-talented Jorge Verdin gets it right musically with this collection of mixes by collaborating with various musicians around the world. Tremolo Audio is his side project away from Clorofila (Nortec Collectives). Minimal at times, subtly complex and always (Jorge being Jorge) cheeky as hell. Love it. Good stuff dude.
Disclosure: Me and Jorge graduated together from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, so I'm biased.
Get the album from iTunes or Amazon.

Datasette

Sad

I'm saddened to read that legendary guitar player+inventor Les Paul died today at the ripe old age of 94. His contribution to guitar rock music cannot be measured. He will definitely be missed.
 
On a different note, but equally sad is the little "What am I doing" status thingy that I discovered today on the Yahoo! homepage. OMG, talk about too little too late. What a laggard Yahoo! has become? And why is it set in light gray at 9pts, hiding inconspicuously up in the corner? Too little, too late and not so committed. Sad indeed.

Japan

Recently I excavated a bunch of old CDs from my storage closet and found a handful of them that I haven't touched in years, many of them way over 20 years old. In the fairly large stack of titles were a few by Japan, a band I have not thought about for a very long time. I first heard their music around 1982 while still living in Hong Kong. Me and my primary school friends were discovering a lot of music back then, and we were particularly fascinated by the new wave bands like Depeche Mode, Yaz, Duran Duran, Ultravox, and the pre-crap, pre-Good-Morning-America Boy George and Culture Club.
 
But it was Japan that really captured our attention. Their earlier materials were heavily influenced by Roxy Music and David Bowie, by their last 2 albums (Gentlemen Take Polaroids, Tin Drum) they sounded like no one else. Back then we didn't really get the music. Atmospheric and minimal songs like Ghost and Life Without Buildings were completely inaccessible to us, but we could follow the more upbeat and melodic tracks like Quiet Life, Cantonese Boy, Gentlemen Take Polaroids, though they were still very complex compositionally. Japan intrigued us anyway because up until that point pop music did not sound like this. Mick Karn's fretless bass lines, Jensen's complex and manic percussion and David Sylvian's baritone vocals were all new. But mainly we thought they just looked so damn cool. They were and always will be inimitable.

Yo La Tengo

Gus Gus – Add This Song

Sugizo, Mick Karn, DJ Krush

Julian Plenti