I heard that there was some sort of wedding today. Apparently, everyone was crazy about Harry and Meghan. Nice folks, but I wasn't willing to wake up at 4 am this morning to catch all of the festivities at Windsor. For the record, I would like to give my best wishes for their
Not quite an earworm but it's short and sweet. And it's been about 2.5 years since I put up a song by Fantastic Plastic Machine. This is "Hey Ladies" which came from the 2009 album "FPM", and listening to it and watching the groovy visual interpretation, I got the feeling that Tomoyuki Tanaka（田中知之）basically minced together every old piece of music from a 1960s movie theatre to introduce the feature presentation. Having been raised in my early years to the swinging lounge music of that decade via TV, there is a fun and nostalgic kick to the 2 minutes and 26 seconds.
And here I thought that FPM had kinda gotten away from the Shibuya-kei aesthetic after all those years. Mind you, it's almost been 10 years now since "FPM" came out so I'm kinda wondering what the man has been up to since then.
Hello J-Canuck!
ReplyDeleteI remember Fantastic Plastic Machine! But I only discovered them from their post-Shibukei work due to, you guessed it, that old Toronto radio show/podcast on CKLN back in the day. I had to work my way back to the older Shibukei-centric music FPM was doing back in the late 90s/early aughts.
My favorite songs from them were "A World Without Love" "City Lights" "Why Not?" and "Obsession."
As you can tell I really loved the Imaginations double album!
Speaking of (again) the old Full Moon JPop podcast I did find their abandoned Blogger page with a playlist of all the songs they featured on their show. At least between 2005 to 2008. They had been going on for ten years before 2005 but those shows are now lost to time.
http://fullmoonshow.blogspot.com/
After reading this article I went back to the articles you have on this site regarding them.
Well done!
And thanks for that link to the AMV of "Why Not?" featuring scenes from Handmaid May.
Whew! Memories...
Hi, Chasing Showa!
DeleteI used to know Tanaka as one of the Shibuya-kei guys but man, did I love "City Lights"! And it was because of the blog that I found out about it. It was just a melodic welcome mat for Tokyo and that intro with the really happy saxophone did it for me.
"Why Not" was a song that I discovered at Tower Records and I ended up getting the CD with the saucy cover of the nude torso. I'm going to have to take a look at that Blogger page of yours. Kinda too bad that there isn't anything like that right now.