Tokyo Math Rock and Photography
Howdy blog, it’s been a while!
The past few weeks we’ve had friends visiting, gotten back to work after taking time off to travel northern Japan, and we spent some solid hours at the Katsushika-ku city offices dealing with paperwork to get our address registered. Time is flying as we’re already on the back end of March and the sakura are starting to come out in full force.
I collaborate on a series of playlists with @birnsi and we recently started a new one for our time here in Tokyo.
There isn’t a specific editorial goal with our playlists, we mostly just add whatever we’re vibing and it kind of turns into a huge mishmash of stuff that intersects our musical interests, and every few months when it starts getting unwieldy we create a new one.
Since I end up listening to the current playlist a lot in the background, some of the songs get closely associated with the goings-on in life at the time of the playlist. So going back and listening to older playlists can send me right back in time.
We hit up our first math rock concert in Japan to go see a band called ANORAK! who we recently discovered. As big fans of both American Football and Chinese Football, seeing that there was a band on the docket called Japanese Football was also pretty exciting. All of the bands were terrific (ANORAK!, downt, Japanese Football, injury tape, and soccer).
It was a night of mathy, post, hardcore, emo delights. I also met some folks in the audience who play in a another band with the bassist from Injury Tape, called Curling - they have a nice sound going on too.
Here’s a brief clip of the band downt:
I’ve gone to a couple photography exhibits the past few weeks which were pretty cool. I follow a Tokyo-based photographer named John Sypal on Instagram who also runs another account called @tokyocamerastyle where he shares the cool cameras he sees people using around the city. John shared on his story about an exhibit by the photographer Hiroyoshi Yamazaki featuring photos he took of Tokyo in the 90s and it was terrific.
The other exhibit I attended was for photographer Masahisa Fukase.
It featured work from throughout his life. I was particularly struck by his obsessiveness. He was brilliant, but his obsession led to some brilliant and painfully autobiographical photographs.
His second wife said, “With a camera in front of his eye, he could see; not without.”
This is a nice article if you’re interested that tells about his life and has some nice photos:
Masahisa Fukase: the man who photographed nothing but his wife (The Guardian)