Owner: Singing Pi, Collapsing Time, The Xenophile Wildstyle, and Other Song Stories URL:http://mog.com/Shinjuku_Zulu Join Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:47:43 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Stories behind & around the songs, with streaming posts, including "Speed Tribes & Slow Is the New Fast", "Repainting Mona Lisa & Scarborough Fair", "I (Large Hear) Music & Mrs. Major Tom", "Badminton &am Site statistics:Click here
Past Lives Part 2... and <i> Coal Coal Black (Instrumental Edit </i> 2007-09-29 18:17:47 Hmm. There’ll have to be a Part 3 to the below post, which’ll have the backstory. Listen to the song while reading, as a soundtrack. It’s from the Instrumental
Edits CD of Various Chimeras by Shinjuku Zulu, at iTunes Here
...and she began to share those stories— neighbors visiting from a nearby homestead heard her read to the children and asked for a story. (She wrote one for them about a fish who wanted to climb mountains.) Other neighbors began to ask, too. (They got ones about words behaving like birds, and a man with four elbows, and…)
More—there was a request to read to the ladies’ social group at the new church. (Their story: a land where clothes were plucked fresh from the bush like a rose, and thrown away when old…) Then the schoolteacher asked for a story for her students. (A porpoise who swam to Italy to see if the fountains there were superior to the one on his head….)
Soon people from the town began r Read more:Black
, Lives
Samuel Jackson... and <i> Segue </i> 2007-08-31 06:45:36 The movie Resurrecting the Champ starring SamuelJackson
, Josh Hartnett, Alan Alda, Terri Hatcher, etc. features the Shinjuku Zulu song Segue, from the first Shinjuku Zulu CD, at iTunes HERE , in it’s soundtrack.
The movie (opening this weekend) is getting good reviews, especially Jackson’s performance…
“Segue” features an African chant by the Arctic Zulu Ensemble over breakbeats, and about midway through, the song morphs into a 4/4 afroelctrotechno-soaring-chorus thingy. In fact, that’s almost what the Globe & Mail had to say about the track, in its review of the CD: “In Segue, a chain of syncopated gasps and a soaring African chorus changes a brooding bass line into the root of something earthy, sunny and intimate.”
A couple other tracks from that first Shinjuku Zulu CD also have African chants on them: Cyclone , Yedayed and Brando
Brian Eno said in a Wired interview some time ago that computers need
Exo-stomachs... and <b> Freedom </b> 2007-08-19 22:38:50 For the last year, give or take a few months, a good friend has been carrying around, in a bag, her stomach. She would eat normally, the food would move through her and at some point (I didn’t ask where), get diverted through a tube and then into the bag, which she wore under her clothes. This bag has a little pump (grinder?), which helped her body process the food. She would have to empty the bag not too long after she ate, and a couple other times throughout the day.
I mean, think about it’s one of those modern medicine = amazing things. You’re carrying around a major organ outside your body! Maybe we’re not too far from the brain-in-a-jar future of those Star Trek/Futurama imaginings. (Hell, we finally have video phones. And private space-travel is close…)
So back to my friend… she has had four or five major operations, and has often been very tired this last year. Her activities have been severly curtailed—she had to stop working (s Read more:Freedom
Ayahuasca... and Yedayed 2007-08-04 03:11:15 Ayahuasca is a psychotropic drug used in South America by shamans in religious ceremonies to induce transpersonal experiences.
Some of the experiences sound wonderful (plants speaking directly to you, instant healing), some perhaps a little frightening (vomiting black snakes, and um, bug people)... but all are ultimately transformative. (Listen to this News For the Soul archived radio show on the topic; it’s about a third of the page down, dated Feb. 15th, HERE )
In a recent book “Power and Somethingsomething” by Somebody Somebody (sorry I can’t remember) the author asks a shaman about the ayahuasca process, and in particular why he seems to speak and sing strange words during the experience. He answers that he uses metaphors and oblique words—for instance instead of using the word “ground” he’ll say “where the peanuts fall”—because when he uses direct words, he crashes directly in to what he is trying to d
O.B.E.... and <i>Rainbowbeau </i> (Part I) 2007-07-19 23:23:58 I used to wet the bed. My pea-sized bladder was so full I’d awaken and quickly throw off the covers and clamber quickly out of bed. I’d feel the thick threads of the rug on my bare feet, and the little shock of static as I opened my bedroom door. In the moonlight, I’d pull up the porcelain toilet seat (cool on my fingers), and pee, the stream hitting the water loudly in the dead-silent house, parents and brother asleep in rooms down the hall. Finished, I’d start to fall asleep as I shuffled back to my room, but manage to get in bed and pull over my covers—hearing little pops of static from the blanket—before blackness.
And immediately awaken to wet sheets. It was always a mystery to me, because I knew I’d just gotten up to use the bathroom.
Sleep is a strange thing. I used to be so good at it; now I seem forever awake. I barely have time to achieve R.E.M. now, whereas before I would always wake up dazed with wonder at the beauty and comf
Dog Technology... and <i> Shinjuku Zulu </i> 2007-07-02 23:07:18 When European explorers encountered the Inuit, apparently northern Canada’s indigenous peoples were fascinated not so much by the explorer’s/exploiter’s guns, but by their dog technology. The Europeans had trained their animals to perform all sorts of functions and understand commands like point, fetch, and so on, in ways that the Inuit hadn’t considered, or considered possible. (Dogs can do….that? )
When the idigenous peoples of Central or South America encountered the first ship from Spain , they had a hard time seeing it, because apparently massive, wind-powered ocean-crossing ships were so far outside the realm of their experience didn’t have the ability, or the neural-connections, to comprehend them. (According, anyway, to the writer who proposed this idea, whose name escapes me at the moment.)
And here’s the reverse: electric light bulbs existed in ancient Egypt, depictions of which are carved in stone images in Dendera . But moder Read more:Technology
Stopping... and <i>Sleep</i> 2007-06-12 17:04:50 “Did you hear about those people who got killed at the bus stop?” someone at the table next to me had just asked me. The man was pointing with a tobaco-stained finger to the newspaper on his table. The lead story was about how a bus had gone out of control in the snow and had run over a father and his son.
“You know, I hit a deer once.” He slowly lifted his cup and took a sip of his Dunkin Donuts coffee, and continued. “With my truck, on the highway. It was raining, nightime, all of a sudden there it was in front of me, couldn’t stop.” He set down his cup and clapped his papery hands together hard as he could, imitating the smacking sound of the accident. “It didn’t even bleed, like you’d a thought.” He reached in his pocket, took out a wrinkled pack of smokes, laid it on the table. “She was a real beauty, too. I felt her heart stop.” He took out a cigarette, placed it next to the pack.
“I̵ Read more:Sleep
Collapsing time... and <i> Hummingbird </i> 2007-06-03 13:44:50 I was in an old building with large windows, right next to Naka-Meguro train station. It was a typical Toyko summer, super humid, and the windows were open to try and create a breeze (there was no air-con).
A bird flew in and settled on a desk before looking around. When it noticed its salaryman surroundings (shady, but sllim-food-pickings), it decided to leave. It immediately crashed into a closed window, then looped out and tried again, and then again, smacking into more and more invisible walls. As it grew crazier in its flight it drew more attention, and people were trying to open all the windows they could. They were also getting brooms and shaking newspapers and waving their arms to try and direct the little bird out. Nothing worked.
Eventually, after an especially loud thump on the window, it fell to the floor. (It remained on its feet, like an aging professional boxer near career’s end.)
The bird, a sparrow, was near me at this point, so I slowly shifted, ca Read more:Hummingbird
Speed Tribes... and <i>Slow Is the New Fast </i> 2007-05-23 08:31:51 In Japan, there is a certain subculture who sci-fi their motorbikes and they ride them very loud and very, very fast. They are called the Bosozoku, which roughly translates into The Speed
Tribes.
But we in the west are the true speed tribes. In our tricked-out gogo gadget lives, not only is faster better, faster is the only option. Too much is not enough, and even faster is still too slow. (Ever felt impatient waiting less than half-a-second for a web page to load? You know what I mean.)
The other day I watched an elderly woman with a cane walk down a short hallway. It was like watching a special-effect sequence in a movie; everyone around her was a blur of movement, too fast to capture-focus; she stood out because she was so slow. It took her a few minutes to walk maybe 20 feet. She was smiling the whole way, lost in her thoughts, clearly enjoying herself. Watching her was calming, like watching a zen garden; I began to feel a different sense of time. (Well, for a little whil
Synchronicity...and <i> Tombouctou, Adieu! </i> 2007-05-01 08:24:07 So “Various Chimeras” (by Shinjuku Zulu) was finished; it had taken nearly three years to complete. Mixing and mastering was all done, and it was about to go to the CD manufacturing stage… when I came across some wax cylinders.
I don’t sample—I like to write songs that sound as if they’ve been sampled, and I’m particularily interested (at the moment) in mixing differing eras. I like the idea that in a sample-style song you are experiencing two or more different times simultaneously. (Kinda like a cubist painting, where you are looking at the front at the same time as you are looking at the profile of the subject.) I also like that in songs with samples you (aurally) inhabit different phyiscal spaces at the same time in the song, each with their own fingerprint sonics— say the plantation field and New York nightclub of Moby’s Natural Blues , or the hip hop, basement turntablism mixed with the battlefield echo of taps in the tra
La la la, Woo-hoo, Hey heys... and <i> Make Me Shake </i> 2007-04-22 00:19:07 And sometimes, sometimes, you just want to write a La La La song —with absolutely nothing to do with mathematics, fine art, dna, haikus or brain entrainment (see previous posts at left,) just… sex.
For the track Make Me Shake
from the Various Chimeras CD by Shinjuku Zulu, I wanted to write a song using only La La’s in the chorus, Do Re Mi’s in the verses, and as few as other words as possible. (But it still had to make lyrical sense.) As in “‘Do re’ me, on the floor/ La ti ‘oh’ me, at the door/get it up, go go low/ here comes an x-rated show/make me shiver, make me shake/ ‘Do Re’ me till I sing:/ La La, La La La, La La….”
I don’t know if it’s the Nelly Furtado Phenomena or the Fergie Effect, (as the song itself says, “Badness is good stuff”) but the Make Me Shake track is currently one of the most popular ones from that CD.
Larissa Gomes, who also appears on all the Shinjuk
Frequency Following Response... and <i>Uneunoia</i> 2007-04-10 08:53:26 Frequency FollowingResponse
(FFR) or brain entrainment is a phenomena where the brain locks on to an external signal and begins to mirror it, or follow it, which produces a change in the brain’s chemistry, which translates into altered behavior. ( Jose Delgado was studying this in the 60s, at Yale, where he found that a modulated radio frequency could alter mood.)
The dark side of this phenomena is where a device like HAARP and its pulsed radio frequency energy could be used, among more nefarious things, to stroke the ionosphere and broadcast frequencies onto a crowd to induce fear, a flight response, lethargy, even anger or other less coherent states. (Want that anti-war mob to disperse from in front of the White House? Dial it up.) Check out this video , at the 0:55 and 1hr 21 minute mark. It’s by Nick Begich , who wrote Angels Don’t Play This HAARP ; also refer to his radio show Changing the Way We See the World.)
The positive side of this entrainment Read more:Frequency
Long Songs...and <i>Coal Coal Black</i> 2007-04-09 07:24:20 I understand short attention spans and all that, but I do like the idea of slow being the new fast. Or rather, long being the new short.
There’s a company that provides a service to radio stations of cropping down songs to just the ‘best’ parts, i.e. the hooks, and will chop out, say, that unecessary third chorus, or that outro, or that bridge, so that all songs fit into a two-minute format, on the theory that people really only want the good parts anyway and don’t have time for more. (In fact record companies have also sliced up songs into ring-tone portions; you pay more for the chorus than you do for the verse.)
I’m not a big fan of nostalgia (hate it, in fact) but when the odd mood strikes me I’ll go on iTunes and listen to thirty-second clips of old favorites. Of course you don’t get the full emotional arc of the song or have time to get into the groove… but in my head I already know the song so that’s enough for me, so Read more:Black
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