Since 2004, he's been building instruments called "Rotators" which are a well crafted mix of sundry household appliances. When I discovered "Rotators" I was amazed how carefully assembled they were. It wouldn't make sound yet it'd be still beautiful pieces of art. But it's actually designed for making sounds. Muneteru controls "Rotators" through a kind of mixer which turns on/off the instruments. Beat patterns are made by sticking small cubes on vinyl discs and using custom turntables.

The Love Arms Series is nice too.

Website: http://the-rotators.com

There's an interesting interview of Muneteru on pingmag.jp.

“I set up everything on the table and control everything from the Rotatorhead, so it ends up looking like a cooking show on TV. As for the instruments, the permanent members of the Rotators are: the blender, for its heavy, low frequency sounds - like a punchy kick drum; the drill, set up too for its snappy, tight snare drum sound; and the hair dryer, which is always involved with my performances because it resembles a fuzzy bass but sometimes takes the role of vocals. Then, I control the Rotatorhead and program it to play in a variety of ways.”

More videos on http://www.youtube.com/rotators

From johncage.info:
“The materials required are all related to water. Some examples: Bath tub, toy fish, grand piano, pressure cooker where steam is being released, ice cubes and an electric mixer to crush them, rubber duck, goose whistle, 5 radios, etc.
The score consists of a list of properties, a floorplan showing the the placements of instruments and objects, thrre pages with a timeline (one minute each) with descriptions and pictographic notations of occurence of events and a list of notes "regarding some of the actions to be made in the order of occurence" (from score). Timings are not accurate: "Start watch and then time actions as closely as possible to their appearance in the score" (from score).”

Well, I don't really see how a grand piano can be related to water, but that's fine with me.

And I can't resist posting this video of Frank Zappa showing Steve Allen how to play bicycle. It was in 1963, Zappa was 22 years old. Search "Frank Zappa bicycle" on YouTube for seeing the whole show.

Such trucks can be seen from time to time on the highway but seldom in the city. Actually "dekotora" need to pass an inspection prior to burn the road. I guess it's better not being involved in a car accident with one of those artsy monsters!

Taken from this page.

Dekotora became popular among truckers in the mid 70's when the movie "Trucker" (??????) was released. Below, an excerpt. I love the song at the end.

One might think only japanese can invent such crazy things but there are some countries where "trucks decoration" is big too. Pakistan for instance.

Taken from this page.

I'm not having much time for preparing my set and I can't actually re-use what I did at oblo last saturday. It was quite experimental and wouldn't work well in such an "open-air" event with no sound check. As usual, I'm planning three parts. I bought a small glockenspiel few days ago that I'm gonna use for the first part. It might sound a bit like Jodi Cave. Second part will be feedbacks mixing, something I already did at oblo. For the last part I sampled some short sequences of a Yakuza movie and bits of contemporary classical music both from the 60's that I'm gonna mix with distorted abstract hip-hop beats. One night left to complete that setup...

Marc of adozen.org kindly invited me to play at an event he's organizing in Fribourg for the "F]]> Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:20:13 -0700 http://virb.com/tokoloten/posts/text/672811 http://virb.com/tokoloten/posts/text/670785 When it comes to remixing a song from a big group like Radiohead, there are tons of guys producing ugly 4/4 club remixes and a few who create something truly original. James Houston, who's just graduated from the Glasgow School of Art, definitely belongs to the second category.

“Based on the lyric (and alternate title) 'Big Ideas: Don't get any' I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.”

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Very few people came but from what I heard they enjoyed the show. Unfortunately I couldn't do visuals as there was no plug that fit my video output.

As usual I can't say much about my set. I had definitely too much reverb and my guitar's microphones which I had tuned to be extremely sensitive didn't behave as expected (because of air moisture?). No pre-recorded stuff, every single sound was done live... I think it was not too bad actually.

Dave Phillips did a great mix of recordings he did while travelling in Thailand and Vietnam. Insects, water, storm... At the end he distributed this text to the audience. Interesting.

Some time after the show, Dave put some insane music like a fantastic "Eye of the tiger" sung by a crazy pakistani guy and some pop tunes from Thailand... That was pretty cool.
Thanks to Phroq who organized the event. By the way he's gonna play at oblo on July 5th with Michael Gendreau. I'll be there!

Update: I uploaded more videos on my YouTube account.