Adventures in Japan

Weekend Update

In honour of today's title, please pretend that any time I write something funny I ruin it by laughing at my own joke before saying it aloud. And that I'm fat and Hispanic.

This past weekend was filled with music - some of it good, most of it excellent, some of it bad, but ALL of it... interesting.

Y'ever heard of a band by the name of Deerhoof? I won't hold it against you if you haven't. Ben, the Ozzie, hadn't and he's a fount of musical minutiae. Here's a quick quote from The Onion on the band:

"Deerhoof sounds like a group of music-school whizzes playing at being a homey rock band, dividing the distance between their Steely Dan and Shonen Knife records."

If you don't know who Shonen Knife are... too bad for you. There's only so much hand holding I can do.

They're (meaning Deerhoof, although the following could also apply to Shonen Knife. But it doesn't) odd and catchy and oddly catchy and catchily odd. And oftentimes loud. Well they were doing a gig in Osaka on Saturday, so we went.

But this post is not about they. Nay!

Nay! I say!

This post is about Afriampo, Deerhoof's opening act.

Deerhoof's sound is hard to explain, Afrianpo's even moreso. Maybe kinda a little like The White Stripes except they're both twenty-something year old girls, and a whole lot rawer. Just a drum and a guitar. And some amps and speakers of course. Without them, you wouldn't get all that squealy feedback. Of which there was a lot of. I just, right there, began and ended a sentence with 'of', is that legal?

The girls made their way to the stage, banging their drumsticks on anything they could. They were both dressed mainly in red. Ragged red rags. With slashes of red... make up? all over their faces. With much smaller slashes of white as well. Very off putting if you ever got to see them up close. Which I did. Not that we were anywhere near the stage, but the guitarist ran through the audience at one point.

But I'll get to that later.

So they drummed rhythmically as they made their way to the stage. The audience clapping along. Then they told us to shhhh. They shushed us for a good long time. That was followed by a longish silence. Then each of the girls just kinda started talking. I have no idea what about. But I imagine things would not have been any more clear had I actually been able to understand Japanese. So on and on they talked, getting louder and louder all the while. By the end they were near screaming, then there was a wall of feedback and then they started rocking out.

Man, them girls could play. It was loud and raw and primal and good.

The third song was about bread. Bread is called pan in Japanese. "Pan!" they yelled as they threw slices of bread into the audience, "PAN!" This is when the guitarist ran through the crowd and this is also when I noticed that their armpits weren't exactly what I would call shaven.

That was probably the high point of the concert. But it was all good.

I would try to describe it more, but that would just be a waste of words. There was loud, driving music. There were soft, quiet parts too. Some of the songs had actual lyrics and structure. Others were just feedback and be-bop screamings.

Never seen anything quite like it.