Tag: zene

侵攻アップグレード

Reolははじめて夏のRock in Japanで生でみた。その時も迫力すごかったけど、やっぱり短く感じてしまったよね… 秋はワンマンやると知ったらもうそれは行くしかないねと思った。抽選も運良くあたったので行ってきた。最高だった。


Ocean @ Tokyo

The Ocean was one of the first “djent bands” in my library, so I was really happy when I heard that they will be playing live in Tokyo. It was also my first time visiting the famous Shimo-Kitazawa area and also ages since the last time I’d been to such a small venue.

I didn’t realize there would be four (!) other bands playing too, The Ocean had all my attention. Some of them were more experimental (reminding me of Deafhaven) while others less so, but to be honest after a while they just felt long.

But the wait was worth it, as The Ocean delivered magnificently. It was also fun to see the community culture centered around the venue. Reminded me a lot of the university music club.


Rock in Japan 2019

今年もまたロックイン行ってきた。3日の土曜でメインの目当てはReol。とはいえラインアップが豪華で朝からほぼ最後まで楽しめた。


Covers

Sometimes I hear a song, and I don’t even realize it’s a cover. Then when I do, I often check out the original too. I kinda trust the artists I listen to, so if they thought a song worthy of covering, then I might like the original too.

There are a few songs like that, that led me to discover older artists I hadn’t known about. One of the first such cover I remember is Helloween’s Fast as a shark. It’s originally a song by the likewise German, and even more ancient metal band Accept. They’ve been around since ’68! Nonetheless, I only found out about them when I heard Helloween’s cover. After that, I had some of their albums in my library for a good while.

Even bigger a success (at least from my point of view) is HammerFall’s cover of Ravenlord. It’s originally a Stormwitch song. Much like Accept, Stormwitch is an older band from the German metal scene that I didn’t know about. When I realized Ravenlord’s a cover, they were actually enjoying some renewed attention, possibly thanks to that very cover. At this point I’m listening to Stormwitch about as much as HammerFall – admittedly not as much as I used to, but they’re still present!


Download Japan 2019

To sum up Download’s experiment with expanding to Japan: good artists, meh sound. The lineup was truly, truly outrageous: Amaranthe, Man with a Mission, Halestorm, Arch Enemy – just to name those who brought me to Makuhari. The headliner Judas Priest are legends (if aged) and some may consider Slayer music too (I have trouble in that regard).


Sync to my phone

I originally planned to make a Rust program that would fix the broken encodings in my music files. Luckily, I could solve that without Rust. Luckily, because from what I’ve experienced since then, it would’ve been a horrible pain in the ass to do.

I still wanted to give Rust a try. Contributing Servo is pretty much out of question – it’s just too high level to jump into as a complete beginner. (And honestly, I don’t think I’ll get past “complete beginner” with Rust anytime soon if ever.) It wasn’t hard to find another issue.


Android and UTF-8 ID3 tags

Remember I complained about the Unicode tags in some of my MP3 files would be borked really badly on Android? Well, I solved it. Kind of.

For a while I’ve been trying to figure out what could be causing it. Some of my files were fine, some weren’t. Even innocent stuff like umlaut characters in German could break, while Japanese music would be displayed correctly.


Rock in Japan 2017

Nyári fesztiválon még egyetemista koromban jártam utoljára – azt hiszem, a 2011-es Summer Sonicon (az se volt semmi felhozatal, az biztos). Persze nem-nyári fesztiválokra mentem azóta is. Írni nem feltétlenül írtam mindről, de az utóbbi pár évben minden Loud Parkon ott voltam, és akkor a két Knotfestről és Ozzfestről ne is beszéljünk.

Idén viszont, hogy már állást is váltottam, végre tényleg hosszúak a hosszú hétvégéim, végre bekerült a “szabadság” a szótáramba, és még a lelki erő is megvan. Így “hirtelen” (nem volt hirtelen) elhatározásból egy jó barátommal elmentünk a Rock in Japan első felére augusztus elején.


Android and Unicode ID3 tags

For a while now I’ve been noticing that certain songs’ ID3 tags are broken when played on my Android phone. I use Black Player which in turn uses the built in Android music libraries – but I’ve checked in a number of other players too just in case and the problem persists.

My music library is extremely multilingual (and most of those languages I don’t even speak), so it’s full of UTF characters. Some of them seem to break Android’s encoding recognition. Sadly some of these triggers are pretty common, resulting in borked last.fm scrobbles. (And of course last.fm can’t be expected to be so smart as to fix all those automatically.)


Knotfest Japan 2016

Knotfest this year in Japan had a really inviting lineup. The first day was rather short for me (making me wonder if it was worth at all). I started the weekend with Disturbed, and they didn’t fail my expectations (so yeah, it was worth). SiM was up next, and it was much better than I thought it’d be. Deftones, on the other hand, wasn’t very impressive for me. I don’t have Deftones in my library and that’s not gonna change. I guess it was good by its own standards, but I wasn’t converted to be a fanboy.

Day 2 was a much longer ride with more bands I actually know. While Anthrax isn’t one of those, they still put up a fantastic show. Good old heavy metal, and they played all the songs I knew from them. The Gazette was pretty nice too, though I wasn’t paying much attention to them until the second half of their set. In Flames were In Flames. I’ve seen them live a few times before, and it was no letdown. The same goes for Crossfaith and Man With a Mission too, who did a great job representing Japan among the headliners. Lamb of God, on the other hand, was much less fun live than I hoped. I don’t know if it was some problem with the sound or I simply wasn’t in the mood, but their show wasn’t exactly overwhelming. Oh and Manson. He did all his great hits, but I guess I’m too old to enjoy seeing a huge middle-aged guy throw tantrums on stage like a little emo girl. Let’s hope little emo girls enjoyed it more.

Slipknot was amazing. The crowd was of course huge, but I’d say it was much better than the last time. The sound was great and they played good old and fresh new songs as well. Their set had a huge screen where they played shots from their music videos, and if you know Slipknot music videos, you know how gorey they are. It was really funny when on the train home I heard some boys complain about how it made them feel sick. Or rather: sic. The show was fantastic.