bonsaijodelfisch

not a fan of that overly clichéed overabuse of "bitches", but damn dat beat and daaaaamn dat detuned piano! approval rating: through the ruuf

ok, since i have apparently not explained enough (or at all) here's what that meant. "badly performed": miyavi still isn't that great of a singer, better than your average vk-dude but still, he's especially not very good at writing/singing nice vocal melodies. also while he is arguably one of the most fluent english speakers in the j-rock corner, the engrish is still strong with him, so singing in english really doesn't help much, as does the fact that each time he speaks/sings in english he somehow feels the urge for either pseudo-inspirational nonsense or utter bro-talk (yo yo, imma rawk teh wurrrld, murtherfurkers) "questionably produced": the main problem here is this one. all the critic above was always there (apart from the english singing which started later), but so far his albums have offered enough other stuff to keep oneself entertained plenty. don't know much about his duelequartz/VK phase, but later with kavaki boys and 7 samurais there was a huge band involved that all did interesting stuff at a top level. on "whatsmyname" he could really show off his pretty unique guitarslapping and looping stuff, whilst having a (in jrock-corner) pretty unusual garagy 60's production sound to it, and a sick ass drummer. this was a guitar-focused album (where he's good at) with added vocals. in terms of vocals he additionally was also able to cover up most "melodie" and engrish problems by simply adding a little scream/shout value to it (it's kind of a cheap trick, but it works...) and now in the production the obvious main-focus lies on the vocals... i find that to be a bad choice. dance pop synthie stuff is totally my thing, but it's just not well executed here. maybe because kpop has ruined me in this corner but here it is really basic and boring stuff. i would understand switching the groovemonster that is bobo to an electronic dance beat if it was an ok dance track, but it isn't. so this is just another reduction of quality too (yeah, he plays in the videos and live, but certainly not in most of the cd-tracks). that leads to another problem, miyavi isn't that well of a songwriter, he always had a knack for good hooks, riffs and otherwise interesting and cool song-elements, but to stretch that over a whole song most of the time didn't work that great, but as mentioned earlier that didn't matter much, because there was stuff to keep you entertained (weird ass band with step dancer / manic guitarwanking+distorted drums) in both those areas miyavi isn't really bad, but not strong enough to carry an album with it alone, when the other parts strip away or are badly executed.

couldn't care less about what miyavi-"era" or whatever we are in or transferring to. hate this preview and quite a bunch of the other ones simply because they're crappy songs, badly performed and questionably produced.

didn't actually buy anything, arguably pretty much avoided that, but i figured this is the right place to show of mah mad DIY-Skillz! lost one of the cushions at the DEG-concert in cologne (jolly me, there even was a moshpit, who'd have imagined?), and the idea of going through the city today, without proper music on my ears was too damn frightening, so foam and scissors it was a new pair costs 30 bucks, damn fascists... (only the cushions that is)

haven't listened to it yet, but i'm pretty sure this needs to be posted here, the beatles / Beastie boys Mashup of the day presenting: THE BEASTLES http://www.thebeastles.com/ sample Ill Submarine all the way... btw.: is there a thumbnail-function for the new forum?

ohyeah, love those (sorta) P90 pickups, already have two guitars equipped with them (China SG and LP) and probably about to get another one (es335-copy) with them too... it's a great amp i have to say, very marshally but with a few twists to it! it offers more gain than you'll ever need, but also has a very smooth transition in the crunch-area, a really simple two-channel setup and a nice sounding reverb for live (wouldn't use it for recording tho). the eq is also quite powerfull in combination with the ISF-control, it can go from mid-muddy doom to almost 5150-esque djent sounds if you put a tubescreamer in front. also it can be surprisingly loud for its 5 watts. if you don't need your clean channel to be actually sparkly clean i'm pretty sure this one would cut a rehersal/gig with full on rock-drums too (and i just love the poweramp-saturation/distortion you can get with those low watteges).

wow, that looks like a behemoth of an amp-setup! nice, very unique! this here isn't all my own stuff, but over the last weekend i had a recording with my funkband at my university-studio, so i thought i'd share some gear-pron here... my amp+cab, standard lead800 marshall 4x12 (celestion g12t75) and blackstar ht5r due to the annoying frequency bums in the speaker, aswell as in the microphone we had to use a pretty "special" placement, which acted surprisingly well in the end our guitarists FX-Chain. most of those are self-built ones from left to right those are OCD - Drivepedal Clone, TS808 Clone, Some Tremolo, FuzzFace Clone, Compressor, Phaser, Wah (Signal goes the other direction tho obviously. in the end there was also a Danelectro Chorus and a boss re20 delay/reverb involved... Vocal-Cabin during the BuildUp with an AKG SolidTube Tube-Microphone Steinway Grand C miced with two Sennheiser MKH40 Studio BuildUp. Guitar-Closet to the left, bassamp still uncoated in the middle, Steinway is behind those windows, Drums would be to the right Gretsch Drumkit with 20"Kick, 12"-14" Racktoms and 16"-18" Floortoms, Snare and Mini Sidesnare Recording/Mixing-Console No.1 SolidStateLogic 32Channel Analog-Console and le me. it broke down halfways through the Recording tho Recording/Mixing-Console No.2 ADT 24Channel Analog-Console and le me

delay to be precise. this is actually the main aspect of this i think. i also think that in this case it might be two different delay cascaded. the "melody" or arpeggio is probably in 8th notes, following that is one delay wich is time-synced on 16th notes and then maybe another one on 8ths, but that's speculation. that way from the second note on it sounds multi-layered and adds up depending on the decay of the delay. that creates this sort of blooming, rainy whatnot effect (but with this short delay it also has to be played veeery precise, which is probably why sugizo doesn't play it live. it's more of a studio technique...)

when mentioning modern Japanese Jazz-rock Tokyo Jihen is an absolute must (if that's not already known anyway)... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KB8I066c8E

SPAM [2]

Lessons of Evil by Takashi Miike (2012 or so) Starts out as a weird creeped out highschool movie before of course turning into a massive gore-fest. not miikes best or anything, but it still leaves a very strong impression. no matter how you look at it it appears almost fun-splatter-like but this whole bloodsoaked exposition gets more and more unnerving to the point of beeing unbearable, as every single glimmer of hope gets shot down almost immediately and unexpectedly. indeed evil....

this kind of argument probably is as old as music itself one of the most prominent examples outside of pop-culture would be Richard Wagner, a known and outspoken anti-semite and racist, but at the same time celebrated as one of the greatest composers. i am kind of split with this one, one the one hand i'm sort of with sai and zess that music objectively doesn't become any better or worse with the personality of the writer. on the other hand pop-culture always sells the whole package, so the artist/image is also part of that. and also there are different levels of dickishness. whilst i'm almost perfectly fine with artist beeing divas and generally awful human beeings to be around, there's for example no way in fucking hell i'd ever listen to some RnB-Song by Chris Brown even if for the sake of the argument i would have liked it before. Edit: and thinking about it that's pretty hippocritical, because i'd probably totally listen to Burzum (and perhaps enjoy it, depending on the music) and see it as a fascinating manifesto of a madman (in this case it also fits very well with the music itself....) in the same way that i watch series like "hannibal" and am completely drawn in by mass-murderers... no, i absolutely don't know what i should think about all this, still for some reason i'd rather listen to burzum than to chris brown (regardless of musical taste...) Edit 2: i might also add that this kind of situation is very much observable right now with "as i lay dying", with their vocalist now beeing accused of arranging the murder of his wife. their facebook is a pretty interesting comment-read on the subject

the rain. that's not supposed to be deep or anything, this sky-piss is just really loud against the window...

i don't get the hate for wolf too... personally i think it's one of the albums best tracks if not the best. album itself is solid, only had to delete 3 or four tracks, which is reasonable for a kpop-release, but it is nowhere near the groundbreaking flawlessness of their mama-mini. it's just another okay pop-album...

good news everybody! http://nineinchnails.tumblr.com/post/51585462200/ive-been-less-than-honest-about-what-ive-really

album trailer a little bit too much on the R'n'B - ballads side of things, but if i steam it down to half of it's tracks it'll possibly be one hell of a mini album

so far from my (narrow) perspective i've never managed to find an actually solid korean rock-formation. korea appeared only as the embassedor of high-quality Pop and maybe a few dreamy acoustic-indie things (basing this observation mainly on the last 2-3 years of youtubes eatyourkimchi-indie-playlist), just as japan's pop-landscape mainly seems to focus on akb48-like bubblegum standard-boxset tracks and never quite accomplish the hights of BigBang, SHINee and the likes, whilst at the same time having a quite mentionable quirky indie-rock and hardcore/metal scene (maybe that view is distorted because of CAT5+Zess+Jigsaw.... constant output of such...) this here is actually the first time i saw a korean rockband and found it to be really solid, very arctic monkeys - ish. very catchy and the vocalist has a nice raspy voice. (also, dem guitar-gals boots *thumbsup) probably going to look for that album they also seem to be damn fine live, a couple of days they had a great pro-shot live-concert up on youtube, deleted it unfortunately already... EDIT: it is uploaded again! btw. they are quite the good looking bunch actually...

favorite new kpop release, shit bangs! also thumbs up for black-metal outfit

whoa! my body is ready completely wolfed down the first 6 episodes now, seems great so far, hope we don't see another promising start fail utterly *cough*sworartonline...