- rainie-is-seasonchange22.10.2021 - 7 hours ago
Shirahige Shrine Torii at sunrise.
Lake Biwa, Japan.
161 - animerveilles22.10.2021 - 9 hours ago
🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸
Mes créations gif sur le thème de la pop culture Japonaise
🌸⛩️🎏🍣🍢🍜
My gif creations on the theme of Japanese pop culture
(◍•ᴗ•◍)❤
🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸⛩️🌸
0 - legalvinyl22.10.2021 - 11 hours ago
West Meets East in Explosion of Psych-Rock Perfection
Kikagaku Moyo’s album Masana Temples lives on the precarious border of extreme pretention but manages to stay within the camp of sanity enough to make it a perfect vehicle to bring a yoga-amateur closer to ‘om’. A combination of unmistakably eastern sounding music aesthetic brought together with the warmth and familiarity of 60’s-influenced psychedelic rock, this album allows the listener to be enveloped in the atmosphere of blissed-out rock music from bandmates that proudly hail from Tokyo. To the western ear, it feels concurrently recognizable while having a tendency toward a curious unknown, and one standout, in my opinion, accomplishes this sentiment beautifully. The third track, Nazo Nazo, features only Japanese lyrics, and I will save you the pain of watching me fail to google-translate that into something sensible, but the instrumental section alone has enough interesting and unique detail to give an impression of just what makes this band so engaging to listen to.
(Take a look at why the psych-rock community can’t get enough of this band)
https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2018/12/kikagaku-moyo-masana-temples-2018-review.html
Let’s start with the tonality of the instruments. Clear, precise, yet warm and comfortable and never straying toward the harshness of poorly recorded and thin-sounding psychedelic records of the past, this song allows the listener to simply melt into its atmosphere. We’re first presented with a robust sounding electric bass that sounds thick and really interjects a lot of energy into the song as it diverts away from the main melody line that the guitars and vocal take up in unison throughout most of the track’s duration. Whenever the main melody ascends and creates tension for the listener, the bass is there to back things off and smooth out the song, and similarly the bass creates tension as well by diverting from the predictability of the melody that adds a kind of call and response to the song. The bass overall takes a laxer approach toward reaching the tonic and takes more liberties with the somewhat predictable rhythms of the melody.
Drums provide a very laid back and soothing accompaniment to the song and seem to be added to taste rather than functioning as a fundamental rhythmic element to the song. Gentle, probably hand-tapped toms add some counterpoint to the tracks but are included with the intention leaning closer to a symphonic interpretation than a thrashing end-of-measure drum fill as is more common within rock music. Similarly, a ride cymbal is lightly tapped throughout the track throwing in some triplets here and there to offset the very passive drum arrangement. Kikagaku Moyo subtracts common elements of rock percussion from the track to imbue a more soothing and ethereal presence to the song and to allow the serene and pervasive aesthetic and melody to dominate over the rhythm. It is fastidious and so tasteful, like a chef adding fresh herbs to a dish right before sending it out of the kitchen.
Now onto those velvety sounding guitars. There’s two major guitar lines in the track, one panned to the hard right which swims through chords and intoxicates the listener with its chorus effect and the other panned to the left which follows the vocal melody with complete precision. The two guitar tracks are so smooth and enveloping, and they have such a perfect balance in the mix that calls attention to them at the right moments while being able to disappear into the background and add to the tracks weight and atmosphere at just the right times, as well. There’s even a guitar solo that comes in place of the vocal lead, but its presentation is again so tranquil and soothing that it almost sounds like an electrified vocal track itself. The solo brings counterpoint to the main melody but sounds so sure of itself and unhurried that it almost sounds like the listener has already heard it a thousand times and can sing along to it out of sheer intuition. Furthermore, the staccato lyrics blend into the song with a delicate approach and do even more to fill in missing frequencies that add thickness and a greater sense of familiarity to a song which so expertly utilizes instruments.
Overall, this band seems to bring all the most loved elements of psych-rock with a decidedly western flavor that manages to sound exquisite and earthy, while retaining its own distinctive identity. Check out the bands YouTube performance on KEXP that further demonstrates all they’re capable of and you even get the added bonus of being able to see and listen to an electrified sitar. There’s simply nothing cooler than that, and realistically not much cooler than the band themselves. With an ear for harmonic complexity and an endless amount of taste, this band adds a fresh new perspective to the psych-rock scene, and I’m thankful to live in an age where this band can get the credit and attention they deserve from listeners around the globe.
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