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November 23, 2024
 

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Suzannah Tartan
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 25, 2009
Miyake score taps the exotic
Jun Miyake is a self-proclaimed lover of the exotic. Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest composition, the music for a revival of avant-garde playwright Shuji Terayama's 1977 play, "Chugoku no Fushigina Yakunin" ("The Miraculous Mandarin").
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Nov 18, 2008
Dancing babies get mom out of the house
In the last year, my son and I have seen concerts by Bob Dylan, Spoon, Alice Cooper, The Raconteurs, The Roots (twice) and Cheap Trick. He worships Ray Charles but is anxiously waiting for The Zutons and AC/DC to tour. His iPod spins a similarly eclectic mix. His younger sister is already showing a marked...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 22, 2008
Takagi taps the color of sound
Is Masakatsu Takagi a musician that makes video art or a video artist that makes music?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 8, 2008
Watt's going on — a punk at 50
Mike Watt doesn't look like a punk. With his fondness for plaid shirts and bushy mustaches, he looks, actually, more like a regular working-class guy — a steel worker, or a sailor like his father.
Japan Times
MULTIMEDIA
Jan 22, 2008
Making day care fit real needs
Second of two parts
Japan Times
LIFE / Lifestyle
Jan 22, 2008
Where corporate care gets it right
In a spacious sunlit room, an infant is dawdled by his smiling nurse. Two toddlers fidgeting quietly in their sleep are patted by their doting teacher. Shelves are lined with infant formula, puzzles and a picture library that includes "The Hungry Caterpillar."
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Dec 18, 2007
Taking time for younger children
Every morning I trundle my daughter onto my bicycle and up the hill to her public day-care center in central Tokyo before heading off to work.
CULTURE / Music
Apr 13, 2007
Ono "Yes, I'm a Witch"
In the John Lennon/Yoko Ono mythology, Lennon was the sincere melody maker lured into the avant garde by Ono, whose public reputation vacillated between wailing banshee and cerebral art bitch. Who would have figured Yoko Ono wrote pop songs too? Such are the surprises of Ono's new album of "remixes."...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 23, 2007
A spiritual conversation
The foreign music press has a weakness for weird Japanese music.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 15, 2006
Bossa nova forever young
The music may be ageless, but bossa nova's founding generation are aging. Forthcoming tours to Japan this month and next by Joao Gilberto, who, along with Antonio Carlos Jobim, was credited with creating bossa nova in the late 1950s, and Sergio Mendes, bossa nova's great popularizer, may well be their...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 26, 2006
Politics scaled with music
Matthew Herbert's new album "Scale" is easy to like. His signature arrangements of accessible house-inflected beats behind jazzy melodies are polished to a glossy sheen. Strings swoon. Horns sound lushly. Songs like the soulful "Moving like a Train" or "When We Are in Love" positively slink out of the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 19, 2006
It's all music for Warp label
Warp, home to sonic pioneers such as Aphex Twin, and Boards of Canada is arguably the most influential electronica label in the world. But don't tell Warp founder Steve Beckett. For Beckett, who began the label with now deceased partner Rob Mitchell in a Sheffield record store in 1989, genre, and in...
CULTURE / Music
May 12, 2006
Juana Molina "Son"
Magical realism usually describes the writings of the great old men of Latin American literature, who have a knack for revealing the enchanted in the every day. Argentine musician and former television star Juana Molina shares the continent's mystical bent, and her fourth album, "Son," could be categorized...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 21, 2006
Keeping rock simple
Jad Fair is the most unlikely of rock heroes. In his 40s, yet with the tall and gangly body of an adolescent and the naive blue eyes of a child, he looks like a preternaturally wide-eyed manga character.
CULTURE / Music
Dec 9, 2005
The Pixies
Bono, Bowie, Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke have all said that The Pixies are one of the most influential bands of the past two decades. But minutes before taking the stage for another sold-out show during the current Pixies reunion tour of Japan, leader Frank Black isn't having any of it.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Nov 18, 2005
Best of friends kick up a storm in the fun house
Nothing frustrates a music critic more than a band that refuses categorization. Lots of bands, intoxicated with their own creativity, might make the claim. Not many, after a few records, resist a formula or a style that isn't easily pigeonholed in a pithy phrase or two.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Sep 4, 2005
Once more, with feeling
With a mane of wild hair and the darkly circled eyes of the sleep deprived, one could easily mistake Kieran Hebden for a grad student up too late at the lab. There is little evidence in his striped polo shirt and khaki shorts that he is one of the more sought after electronica producers and performers....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Jul 10, 2005
Contort yourself, by any means necessary
"No New York," the 1978 compilation produced by Brian Eno, remains a snapshot of lower Manhattan's music scene at that time. The pioneering punk club CBGB's was thriving, the influential performance space-cum-disco, the Mudd Club, was about to open and a musician could still afford to live in the East...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
May 29, 2005
Diva sings hot and cold on solo debut
It is 11 on a Sunday morning and Roisin Murphy has just arrived back at her London flat. Another big night out in the city's kinetic clubland?
CULTURE / Music
Mar 6, 2005
Red Krayola
Few musicians have tuned in and then twisted the musical zeitgeist as much as Mayo Thompson. Red Krayola, the main conduit for his music, is arguably rock's longest running underground band. Founded in Texas in 1966 as a psychedelic group, Red Krayola made the most outlandish freaked-out sounds of the...
Japan approves ¥21.9 trillion stimulus plan
The policy chiefs of the Democratic Party for the People, Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito — Makoto Hamaguchi (left), Itsunori Onodera (center) and Mitsunari Okamoto — shake hands after reaching an agreement on an economic stimulus package on Wednesday.
Tokyo Metro’s overseas efforts begin in earnest with London deal
Tokyo Metro will soon have a role in the running of London's Elizabeth Line, a major train route serving the U.K.’s capital city and environs.
Saitama court bans demonstrations over anti-Kurd hate speech
Kurdish people in Japan in 2015. A court injunction has banned acts that defame the Japan Kurdish Cultural Association and are disrespectful, such as putting up banner flags or handing out fliers with hate speech like “Refugees should go back to their home countries.”
China reinstates visa-free travel for Japanese nationals
Beijing Daxing International Airport
U.S. aircraft carrier returns to Japan carrying navy’s ‘most capable fighter’
U.S. 7th Fleet Commander Vice Adm. Fred Kacher speaks to reporters shortly after the arrival of aircraft carrier USS George Washington at Yokosuka naval base in Kanagawa Prefecture on Friday.
Shohei Ohtani wins National League MVP award
Shohei Ohtani celebrates after hitting a three-run home run against the Padres during the National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles last month.
The slow-burn success of ‘A Samurai in Time’
A 19th-century warrior gets struck by lightning and wakes to find himself in 21st-century Kyoto in Junichi Yasuda’s surprise hit “A Samurai in Time.”
Around a quarter of Japan married couples in their 20s met through dating apps
A survey released by an organization promoting “Good Couples Day” shows that 24% of couples in their 20s met their marriage partner through a dating app.
'Tokyo Swindlers': Get deep into the minds of real estate con artists
In Ko Shinjo's "Tokyo Swindlers," a group of con artists manipulates real estate giants into falsified deals within the highly competitive, quick market.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.

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