Posts Tagged ‘Music’

Freedom 4 goes on sale today, so I can finally post some screen caps from the renewed opening sequence :

I must have seen the opening sequence a hundred times over（ both the old and updated one ) through the course of my work here but I still get that adrenaline rush everytime I watch it because its so beautifully done ( by the brilliant folks at Kamikaze Douga 神風動画 ), with the visuals and Utada’s “This is Love” complementing each other perfectly. In this renewed sequence the visuals get an update, with some new content from episode 3 spliced in, as well as Ao’s first appearance.

I haven’t been following much Japanese music other than Hikkie these days, but during a recent trip to Tsutaya an album playing in the store caught my fancy so much I asked for it after listening to just 2 songs. It turns out the copy they were playing was the only one they had in the store – so its a case of pure serendipity I guess. The album is “School Food is Good Food” by a relatively new band who call themselves School Food Punishment. Please don’t ask me why; Japanese bands have the strangest names.

You can listen to 2 sample tracks from the album here. I’m drawn inexplicably to music which triggers my brain to visually create scenarios, a sort of mental mise en scene – which very often create inspiration for my animation projects. Music by Chicane and Clannad, for example, and most recently School Food. I really like that feeling.

By the way, my 2 year old Ipod is dying on me. There’s rumours abound that the 6th generation Ipod will feature a full touchscreen like the Iphone, so let’s see what Steve Jobs say later this year before I make plans to replace my old one.

Watching Reality Bites (1994) for the first time in its entirety brings back very fond memories of my early secondary days where the nostalgic soundtrack featuring Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” was one of the first CD’s I ever owned, and this was still way back in the early 1990’s where the now mesozoic cassette tapes were been slowly but surely supplanted by CDs, a fate they themselves seemed doomed to reiterate in the wake of digital music.

That aside, Reality Bites is an extremely important film in recent cinematic history not only because its serves as an irreplacable memory bookmark in an early chapter of my life ( the transition from bespectacled, nerdy primary school kid to bespectacled, nerdy secondary school kid ), but more importantly because its the emblematic teen-angsty, quasi-intelligent, 90s era defining film, just as what the Matrix Trilogy had done for the new millenium years. This once again demonstrates the power of the cinema and its ability to change worlds and shape lives, deliberate or not. Now the debate of whether Bites was a good or bad film requires another article altogether, but undisputedly, it had one heck of a bloody good soundtrack, bar Sharona or none.

Having bought us memorable tracks like “Yesterday & Today”, “Fukai Mori”, “Rakuen” amongst others, Japanese rock group Do As Infinity has officially disbanded with the release of their greatest hits album “Do The A side”, which contains all 20 singles since their debut in 1999 with “Tangerine Dream”. Recalling the early days when the trio performed as a street band in Shibuya before they made it big, to the times when their official website was launched and they saw only an average of 7 visitors per day, DAI’s has come a long way, and their collective music will be missed.