Billboard magazine usually includes some sort of coverage of Asian markets, but once a year, they devote a number of pages to spotlight Japan. In this week’s issue (Vol. 119, No. 33), there’s a sidebar titled "Faces to Watch", which includes bands the magazine deems buzzworthy.
Here’s who they feature:
Greeen A rap quartet who keeps their identity tightly under wraps. The band’s label site should have some audio clips. I went through my Dragon Ash phase a long time ago.
Midori Some audio can be found over at Bounce.com and perhaps on JPOPSUKI. Judging from the Bounce clips, they sound like perfect SXSW fodder.
Mitsuki She’s 15 years old, but she’s got a pretty mature voice. Two of the Windows Media clips on her official site don’t launch the player, so you’ll have to paste the URL.
Jyongri Billboard mentions she was inspired by the movie Sister Act at a very young age. O … K …
Angela Aki I checked out Angela Aki when she debuted in 2005, but I wasn’t very impressed.
Tamurapan Of the artists profiled, Tamurapan is the only one going around conventional channels to reach her fans directly through Myspace. Not bad.
These days, I don’t seek out new Japanese artists so much, aside from SXSW and perhaps something mentioned over at Bounce or Keikaku. But I thought I ought to pass along these names to folks who may still be interested in exploring something new. That, and Billboard is kind of expensive.
I went to Waterloo Records last night to get the Vermeer Quartet’s cycle of Béla Bartók string quartets when I found a New World reissue of a Morton Feldman collection originally released on Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI). Curious to see how far New World has gotten in reissuing CRI’s catalog, I visited the label’s web site and discovered the entire catalog is now available as burn-on-demand discs.
Each discs includes the original cover art and liner notes and cost the same as regular New World discs. The service began back in March 2007.
Before it shut down in 2003, CRI had a policy of never taking a title out of print. Now the catalog is back in a form that may actually prove very cost-effective. I’d love to see how much interest this service generates.
The catalog itself has a number of interesting artifacts.
I love Firefox as much as the next web geek, but does it really need its own music festival? In Japan, it does, so reports Bounce.com. The Firefox Music Festival ’07 happens Sept. 15 with a line-up featuring a number of indie bands, including SXSW alumni Tsu*Shi*Ma*Mi*re. (I do like the name MARS EURYTHMICS, though.) The concert is being webcasted. I wonder if you can view it on Safari and Opera. I’m not even bothering with IE.
If you’re tired of seeing question marks every time Winamp scrobbles an MP3 with Japanese tagging, you’re in luck. Last.fm has released an updated Winamp plugin for testing. If you’re an old-school plugin user, you’ll have to install the client to take advantage of the Unicode support. You’ll also need to install Winamp 5.34 or later, since that’s the version and build in which the player fully supports Unicode.
After three months of no Scrobbling, I’ve started up again, and to test this update’s mettle, I played a bunch of Japanese-tagged files. Looks promising.
I can now start retagging my files to use Japanese. I could just keep it in Romaji (easier to read for me, at least) but I need the reading and writing practice. I’m also going to have to start feeding Last.fm all the stuff that I’ve been listening to these past three months.
I guess it all depends on how you stack the numbers. A professor in Dallas, Texas, performed a study which found a 0.75 drop in album sales for every hour of radio listening per person from 1998 to 2003, so says the New York Times (registration required or not.) I haven’t read the study, but the Times article characterizes the relationship as a correlation — not a causation.
That 0.75 drop could explained by any number of factors, not all (or any) of them related to radio. But what if radio were responsible for a drop in album sales? The reason I stopped listening to radio was because I just didn’t want to get sick of hearing some hit song over and over, even if it was something I originally liked. Overplay — that could kill an album sale. Personally, I just assume if it’s on the radio, it must suck anyway.
So yeah, I think I can buy into the idea that radio hurts album sales. Why not?
Exception for public radio and, perhaps, college stations.
I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me when I saw the headline, "Sonic Youth’s ‘Hits’ Heading To Starbucks" on Billboard.com. But, no — Sonic Youth is actually throwing together a compilation for the coffee chain, and the full title is Hits Are for Squares.
Of course, there were the usual haters who called bullshit on the release, but I thought the idea of Sonic Youth being sold at Starbucks as surreal enough to make sense. Imagine standing in line for your cappuccino and hearing Kim Gordon on the sound system chant, "I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell. Does this sound simple? Fuck you!"
That would be cool.
Even Thurston Moore realizes the incongruity of the pairing. From the article:
"I guess, for some, Sonic Youth represents something that they don’t really equate with Starbucks," Moore says. "But I kind of like the absurdity of it. Sonic Youth has always, in a way, made itself available to the super mainstream."
Was it really 20 years ago that Naxos was launched? I was a freshman in high school when the label launched, and I remember reading the sneers in classical music publications I read around that time.
I was starting to explore classical music at the time, and impressionable as I was, I steered clear of Naxos releases, instead opting for budget line discs from the majors (which, of course, started those lines to compete with the burgeoning success of Naxos.)
Today, pretty much any classical music section of a music shop is stuffed bin to bin with Naxos releases. A few years back, I wanted to listen to Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima while I was working a shift at Waterloo Records. The store’s Penderecki section was slim, but a Naxos release of the composer’s orchestral works included the piece. The mercifully cheap price was a boon to my retail wage.
The fact Naxos embraces digital media and licenses its catalog to eMusic — free from DRM — is a strong selling point for the label, and its presence on eMusic convinced me to sign up.
So happy birthday, Naxos. In the words of the old Virginia Slim ads (or Fatboy Slim): "You’ve come a long way, baby."
I’ve been waiting for Winamp to support Unicode-tagged MP3 files for a good half decade now, and with the release of Winamp 5.34, it’s finally happened. But I couldn’t really see it until I uninstalled my Last.fm plugin.
With Winamp 5.33, Unicode-tagging support was extended to most of the Media Library but not all. Question marks would still appear in the taskbar of Windows. That behavior is resolved in version 5.34, but according to the release notes, Winamp reverts back to the old behavior of substituting question marks for Unicode characters if third-party developers do not update their plugins.
Winamp hasn’t really done a good job of sending Unicode data to Last.fm since, well, the beginning, and now it looks like it can … but not until the AudioScrobbler plug-in is udpated. As I mentioned in a post to the Last.fm support boards describing this exact situation that I had to make a choice: tag files in Japanese with no Scrobbling, or Scrobble with no Japanese tags.
Of course, these efforts will be for naught since Last.fm still seems to be working on integration with Musicbrainz. I’ve actually been contributing to Musicbrainz in the hopes of affecting change in Last.fm, but I don’t see any evidence of those changes trickling down. Sometimes, AudioScrobbler will take my Shiina Ringo-tagged files and display 椎名林檎, but with, say, Hatakeyama Miyuki, it’ll go through as Hatakeyama Miyuki, not 畠山美由紀.
Which, I guess, begs the broad question — what’s the point?
(So — who can recognize from where I took the title of this post?)
Collecting web links isn’t something I do often or, for that matter, well. And while I’ve been tempted to try out del.icio.us’ linklog capabilities, I end up passing. It would become yet another Internet property I’d neglect.
So here’s a one-off linklog of stuff I’ve saved to my del.icio.us page.
JWID Musicians who record cover songs can go to the websites of the Harry Fox Agency, ASCAP, BMI or SESAC to find out to whom to pay mechanical royalties. What happens if you cover some Japanese bands? I’m kind of toying with that idea, but I didn’t really know what I’d do if I ever took a Japanese cover album seriously. JWID is the JASRAC equivalent of ASCAP, BMI and Harry Fox. Of course, you’ll need to know how to search in Japanese to find something such as the publisher for Shiina Ringo’s "Tsuki ni Makeinu". Nor have I found out just how to make remittance to an international publishing company. But finding who owns the publishing is a start.
International Music Score Library I saw this on Metafilter. I haven’t downloaded anything yet, and of course, the 20th century selections come with a huge disclaimer about their public domain status.
Samples of the Javanese gamelan of Museum Nusantara Delft A museum in the Netherlands has sampled individual notes of its Indonesian gamelan instruments. Last weekend for a class project, I downloaded these samples and assigned them to individual keys in the Reason NN-XT sampler. I was very impressed. Now if only someone would sample a jegog.
Kronos Quartet has teamed up with Boosey & Hawkes to publish sheet music of works commissioned and performed by the group. The first volume of this series is already available at Kronos’ web store and consists of works by Terry Riley, Hamza el Din and Aleksandra Vrebalov. For corroboration, I also found it at Sheet Music Plus. I’m hoping future volumes might include Franghiz Ali-Zade’s Mugam Sayagi, or Café Tacuba’s 12/12.
