Tag: zene

My new gear

Earlier Reol announced that No title- will get a vinyl release. I love that album, so I ended up preordering it before realizing that I don’t actually have a record player. Well, that changed now.

And while I was at it, I also got a few old Japanese jazz fusion records from Disk Union and Thy Catafalque’s Rengeteg too.


Arabaki.

I was looking at Reol’s tour dates when I found a surprising entry: the Arabaki Rock Festival, end of April. It was surprising because fests like that are usually in the middle of summer (see Summer Sonic or Rock in Japan) and this one, well, definitely isn’t. At first I wasn’t all that interested, since it’s held near Sendai which is quite a distance from Tokyo to go for a Reol show, but then I looked at the lineup and changed my mind.


『RESONANCE EMOTION』 Vol.0 -ZERO TO HERO-

LUPINUSで逃してしまったWisteriaが俺にとってのメインだったが、ちゃんと最後まで楽しめるライブが渋谷THE GAMEで開催された。

Wisteria

AA=山嵐

大学の軽音部で何回かMad Capsule Marketsのコピバンが見れてかなり好きな音楽になった。AA=がその後継として(語弊)存在してることは数年前に知った。そしてやっとライブで本家が見れた。山嵐のツアーの最後のステージでAA=が出るという豪華な組み合わせはさすがに逃しません。


MARUDASHI CARNIVAL ’23

最近発見したバンドのEarthists.を見たかったので渋谷のMARUDASHI CARNIVALいってきた。Earthists.以外でもC-GATEなど日本のヘビーなバンドが勢ぞろい。ただこの日はかなり予定が複雑で… 朝から奥多摩で山登ってから御岳渓谷で軽くボルダリング、からのEarthists.だけ見てから一旦抜けて友だちと炙り食べてワイン飲んでの予定があって、から終電までMARUDASHIに戻った(そして終電で帰ってから近所で更に飲んでたけどそれはまた別)。


Knotfest Japan 2023

Knotfest is back! I’ve been there both times it was organized in Japan (though I only have a blog post from the 2016 event). I had to look through my photo archives to confirm I was there in 2014 too, and I was surprised to “learn” that apparently I’d seen Korn live back then… This year the plan was different.


Hearing Loss Park 2023

I’ve been to Loud Park twice before, in 2012 (got a shirt but no blogpost) and 2016, so I was pretty happy to hear it was coming back after years of covid-forced absence. The lineup caught my eye because of Pantera—I thought they’d never tour again since the Abbott brothers died, so this was a chance I wasn’t willing to let go (even though I’m not that much of a Pantera fan).


LUPINUS 2023

ライブはライブにつながる。KNOTFESTの情報を知ってオープニングの魔法少女になり隊は見に行けないとわかったから、そのバンドの他の日程調べて下北沢のLUPINUSフェスを見つけた。下北の多数の会場で同時に開催される一日まるごとライブのイベントで、思った以上に楽しかった。

Bamboo

Addictions

Observing my own behavior I realize that I tend to get “addicted” to things. For example last year it was League in the early months and interior design after getting back from Pakistan. Of course it’s on top of my generic routine of going to the gym and hiking, climbing and/or snowboarding, but it also means that it takes a huge amount of effort to focus on anything else. Even if I want to code up some of my ideas, I’d end up playing ranked for hours or looking up reversible interior hacks for my tiny flat.

For the past few weeks the ongoing addiction has been playing the bass. I don’t know why it suddenly clicked so hard (since I’ve owned a bass for over a decade now and practiced some riffs on and off) but it did. It’s been since I graduated (and thus stopped playing actively) that I had calluses on my fingers. My sense of rhythm is still trash, but even when I was in the music club it took two years to develop that, so no rush there.

This time though I picked up an audio interface (Focusrite Scarlett 2i2) so that I can hear and record better. I’ve often seen Youtube musicians joke about “the first time you hear yourself recorded” and damn it’s true. The bad is real. But I guess that’s what makes the progress of learning new stuff so enjoyable.


Discovery weekly

I appreciate Spotify’s regularly changing playlists. I have trouble keeping my daily playlists in any shape (they tend to converge on way too similar music), but I like the Discovery Weekly and the Release Radar a lot.