MAGNETICS.

Seven years ago I recorded a mix-tape called “Magnetics to numbers”. It was my second mix I ever recorded (the first one was lost). The name came from the rather silly fact that I recorded it on a C-90 cassette tape then transferred to my friends minidisc, recorded to a computer at my school and burnt onto two CD’s that I biked around in Copenhagen and gave as christmas gifts to a couple of dear friends.

GRAVITY PROBLEMS.

In 90’s, Hanayo was known as a geiko (a junior geisha or a geisha in apprentice) back then she was representing Japanese culture in some fields partly because of this obvious reasonable fact, partly because she used to perform in collaboration with Violent Onsen Geisha and Merzbow, so-called Japanese noise musicians, I didn’t know much about her activity as an artist back then. In the 90’s everybody was into pop culture and it seemed she fitted into the time for Japanese pop culture emerging, from Pizzicato Five to DJ Krush, no matter how she was consciously or not. She was featured as a cover model for The Face magazine (1992) UK which was gone in 2004. Her version of ” Jose Le Taxi” caught my ears in 2002. I found out her again and gradually I understood she took it very seriously.

TOTAL FARMING RECALL.

I’m not proud of it, but when i began to hear about the growing financial crisis, i was a little bit excited. I saw it ushering in an adventurous amish-esque lifestyle, a global version of the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse. A return to the pre industrial halcyon days, before capitalism, before plastic, back when we all loved one another. But really though, regardless of how bad the economy gets who is ready to sacrifice urban living and sustain themselves via natural rural farming?

If integrated agriculture has anything to say about it, it won’t ever come to that either/or decision. We can have our office, our cars, our frantic urban lifestyles AND have our farms to sustain ourselves. Integrated farming is farming with consolidated resources, instead of ploughing your field, you let pigs to the job by digging up roots. Instead of using chemicals on your crops, you can plant clover to fight off pests. But those are simple explanations, and out of date.

Picture from the interior of Pasona o2, Tokyo’s underground farm.

BORN TO BE A BOARD MEMBER.

For maybe the first time in history it’s not easy to be a board member of a major company. Or let’s just call it less easy because even though the numbers are down globally there’s still enough sauce left for the well-bred to keep their necks fat.

NORTHERN HOSPITALITY.

Eboi represent a quite recent new wave of rappers in Sweden, a wave that have received well-deserved attention not only within the borders of the kingdom but also abroad, even reaching to the other side of the Atlantic. It’s no coincidence, people like Adam Tensta and his brother in arms, Eboi obviously aim beyond the local Swedish scene but without ignoring that international recognition is based on being embraced by the locals, just a larger quantity of local communities than the rather limited population of Sweden.

SHIBUYA 300 PT.

Last Sunday me and my girlfriend headed down to Yokohama to check out Tama University’s graduation show. Takahiro Yamaguchi, one of the guys that can be seen in the latest It’s Our Thing lookbook was one of the students whose work was shining strongest. The level of the work was extremely high and if I could see work of this caliber in the established areas of Aoyama and Shibuya I would probably complain less.

MUTE BEAT.

Once I interviewed Ryuichi Sakamoto, the composer/the pianist, he said he’d had to learn the history of western classical music within eleven years “The whole experience itself was so weird” he added, “if you think about you are a japanese”.

COSMIC ERUPTION.

Everyone has fantasies about running a cult, its human. If i could pick the subordinates in my commune i would choose three men (women are sorely underrepresented when in comes to religious sects and cults). Yukinori Maeda would naturally take care of the clothing, probably light green Tunics and matching light green undergarments. James Turrell would take care of the shelter (hopefully inside his private volcano) and LA’s favorite polygamist chef Father Yod would prepare the meals, if we could resurrect him.

Yukinori Maeda is a Japanese artist and the man behind the Cosmic Wonder label. He has been working for a few years producing austere and minimal installations dealing with utopian ideas about transcendence. Transcendence manifested through light: light as an agent for spiritual reflection, refraction, occasionally revelation.  

James Turrell also works with light, but he could not be further away from Maeda’s ideologically. Turrell has a Quaker background, a background of abstinence, raw foods, silent group reflection and a overall rejection of the secular material world. Maeda, a Japanese fashion designer, seems unafraid of materialism in all its guises. Turrell is now an earthworks artist, and is currently hollowing out a extinct volcano (”Roden Crater”) in New Mexico which will be open to the public in 2011. Compared to Turrells holographic light work (which Maeda seems to have borrowed a lot from) the idea of this monumental light sculpture seems ancient and timeless. What is amazing is that Turrell has been working on Roden Crater for almost 30 years.

The thoroughly modern images on the right are two examples of Turrell’s work from the late 60’s.

You can watch a documentary on Turrells work HERE.

ANCHOR.

One of the best tracks of last year also had one of the best music videos. It came from Philadelphia’s Sandman, one quarter of Re-Up Gang, and the track “Anchor” shine as the by far best track from the “Gianormous” album of 2008.

NOW THING 1986.

The inauguration concert for Barrack Obama was a who’s who of the top layer of afro-american artist, celebrating a polititan that for once represented a ideoligy often expressed in the music of these artists. It’s liberating to see good artists on the same side as the polititians for a change, a never seen connection between urban music-culture and politics have now been tied in the US. It’s of course nothing rare to use popular musicians to pull people to rallies but to say that most of the times it’s a kaukasian male with a guitar around his shoulder is to say the least.

STIMULUS PACKAGE.

Four years ago, I heard my friends criticizing the article they’d read at a cafe in New York. The article was “In Praise of Chain Stores” (The Atlantic magazine) by Virginia Postrel. I just listened to them because I didn’t have any materials to cut in, I hadn’t and still haven’t been to nowhere but New York City in the United States. Last year I remembered that conversation, when Item Idem, the artist/ designer made the work called “Big Beacon” for the exhibition “Death By Basel” at Project Space Fred/Frederic Snitzer Gallery in Miami.

WE’LL MEET AGAIN.

According to Jim Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, we have to act on climate change within four years. I think many of you heared that Obama made it very clear in his first speech for Congress. In the case we fails, there’d happened calamities and disasters, such as flooded cities, species extinctions and spreading deserts.

PROLONGED DMT TRIP.

Amazing how many tentacles a little known 70’s french cartoon can have. It’s called “The Fantastic Planet” (or “Le Planet Sauvage” in french), a animated sci-fi odyssey directed by Rene Laloux and illustrated by Roland Topor. It has a quaint and stuttery 70’s animation style, but the actual story is quite minimal and bleak. Kind of dystopian parallel world where humans (called Ome’s, derived from ‘homme’ in french) are treated as pets and pests by leotard wearing aliens called Draag’s.  

DEQUEZ.

The past week I’ve been hanging out quite a lot with my good friend Uffe from Sweden who have been visiting Tokyo. He’s one half of the now more or less defunct hip hop duo Dequez who some years ago did the brilliant track “The Others” (Uffe is on the second verse). If I don’t remember wrong version on the right is actually a remix and not the original. The remix production is made by Leoparden, who recently remixed Mikah 9, the original was produced by Judde who’s on the first verse.

SUPERSESSION OR “END TO END BURNERS”.

For a long time, I’d lost my interests in graffiti/aerosol art. It occurred again when I went to Tallinn, Estonia also stayed one night in the east side of Berlin three years ago. I assume partly because I’d had a distance from graffiti/aerosol art, I couldn’t tell the difference between the styles I saw in these two cities. You can say it’s not necessarily to be so distinctive if you mention about them, simply with the fact that geographically they are located in the neighborhood from a global bird’s eye view, maybe for a japanese.