It’s been an eventful week out in the real world, so here’s some pretty, mellow, noodly Shoegaze in the form of Lúna’s “Leggöng Tunglsins.” I think they’re Icelandic.
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Shoegazer Sunday: Lúna’s “Leggöng Tunglsins”
Sunday, April 21st, 2013Shoegazer Sunday: Alcest’s “Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde”
Sunday, April 14th, 2013Alcest, a French shoegazer band that sounds a little bit like M83 by way of Sigur Ros and Midsummer, offers up the compelling “Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde” (“Memories of Another World).
Japanese Pop Punk Band SpecialThanks
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013While plumbing the depths and breadths of YouTube for suitable Shoegazer Sunday entries, sometimes I stumble across something interesting that doesn’t fit in the Shoegaze label. Today let’s take a look at Japanese band SpecialThanks.
The first 20 seconds of silence is just to mess with you.
So a pop-punk band with a deadly cute female lead who sings in English that sounds like a cross between Blink-182 and [Insert Current Teenage Female Pop Sensation Here]. This is the sort of Japanese cross-cultural pop artifact that Bruce Sterling circa 1992 would have been all over. As it stands, I’m pretty sure some canny American record label would make millions signing them over here…
Shoegazer Sunday: Clams’ “Sundae Bird”
Sunday, April 7th, 2013From Japan comes Clams with “Sundae Bird.” The first 48 seconds are space music drone, but after that the catchy dreampop tune kicks in.
XKCD’s Time
Sunday, March 31st, 2013It’s easy to assume that everyone in the world follows Randall Munroe’s geeky online stickman webcomic XKCD, since it seems all my friends do. For those that don’t, last Monday he put up a strip called “Time.” This strip, like his uber-large “Click-and-Drag”, plays with the conventions of the form. “Time” started out with a static, non-gag image with the hover-over label “wait for it.” Since then, he’s updated the image every half-hour to an hour, even though he’s done new strips on the usual M-W-F schedule. If you follow the images in order, “Time” shows two people (which XKCD devotees have dubbed “Cueball” and “Megan”) building a sand castle.
Here’s an animated gif of the images so far:
Here’s a quicker version, which you can also step through, speed up, slow down, etc.
Here’s the explanation page for it, as well as its own Wikia. We now have a real-life version of those people obsessively tracking online image snippets from Pattern Recognition, except we actually know who they’re from.
The obvious metaphor is how time continues to flow and things change when you’re not watching.
As of this writing, the images are still being updated. Munroe could keep updating that one comic for a long, long, er, time, especially if he decreases the update rate.
Conceivably, “Time” could be a long-running conceptual art project and keep updating for the rest of our lives, and beyond, like that German church playing John Cage’s “As Slowly as Possibly” for 629 years…
Shoegazer Sunday: Pastel Blue’s “Ariel”
Sunday, March 31st, 2013Another Sunday, another obscure Japanese Shoegaze band. This time it’s Pastel Blue with “Ariel.”
A lot of people compare them to Slowdive, and this songs tells you way.
Shoegazer Sunday: Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Antennas to Heaven”
Sunday, March 24th, 2013I’ve tried listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor before, but nothing clicked until I chanced across “Antennas to Heaven,” the fourth track from Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. The first four minutes are sort of random sound assemblage, but after that there are several extremely interesting segments, recalling everything from the end of “Layla” to Mike Oldfield’s Hergest Ridge, with a lot of tasty gaze and post-rock in-between.
And the entire album seems to be on YouTube as well:
Shoegazer Sunday: Mirage in the Water’s “Chimera Panorama” (plus The Hour-Glass Sanatorium)
Sunday, March 17th, 2013What is it with Shoegaze bands and surreal Communist-era Eastern European films? First No Joy used the Czech film Daisies. Now here’s Mirage in the Water’s “Chimera Panorama,” whose video features clips from the 1973 Polish film The Hour-Glass Sanatorium, which looks extremely weird and interesting.
And it being the Internet, the entirety of The Hour-Glass Sanatorium is available online as well:
The video is in black and white, but the film is in fairly glorious color.
Shoegazer Sunday: The Asteroid Shop’s “Destroyer”
Sunday, March 10th, 2013Austin’s own The Asteroid Shop presents “Destroyer,” a video full of stop-motion plastic dinosaur goodness.
I may have to catch one of their live shows one of these days…