Plus-Tech Squeeze Box -- Dough-nut's Town's Map

By Angeldm via Wikimedia Commons

Well, I never thought I would ever see a video combining the hilarity of a "Looney Tunes" cartoon with the macabre nature of a particularly sour "Outer Limits" episode. But to be honest, I haven't seen a "Simpsons" or "Family Guy" entry recently.

I am referring to the above music video created by YouTuber xchemix for the Plus-Tech Squeeze Box song "Dough-nut's Town's Map", a track on the band's second album "CARTOOOM!" from 2004. The track itself is one friendly ball of looniness that sounds like an especially insane and grand soundtrack to one of those old Warner Bros. cartoons from the 50s or 60s. And apparently, the gaggle of singers, represented by the catch-all group name of The People of Dough-Nuts Town, includes Chinatsu Furukawa from the duo Sonic Coaster Pop.

The melody reminds me a bit of "Heigh-Ho", the famous work song performed by The Seven Dwarfs in the 1937 animated feature "Snow White" by Walt Disney. That makes the "Gotcha" moment in the video all that startling when it arrives at the end. There is something quite "Soylent Green" about that. One-half of Plus-Tech Squeeze Box, Tomonori Hayashibe（ハヤシベトモノリ）, was responsible for words and music.

capsule featuring Sonic Coaster Pop -- Life Style Music

 

Well, winter is definitely back in town. We're due for about four inches of snow by the time today shifts into tomorrow. Might be the perfect weather for Hump Day commuting. 

It might be time for some blippity-bloppity technopop to get the blood flowing and the nerve endings fired up once more for that one more burst before the weekend arrives. Here is the short-and-sweet "Life Style Music", a collaboration between Shibuya-kei/technopop duo capsule and the technopop group Sonic Coaster Pop which I only discovered earlier this year.

"Life Style Music" hails from capsule's third album "phony phonic" from November 2003. It's got quite the percussive rhythms in there and the percolating synths with both bands indulging in their high-toned vocoders. Yasutaka Nakata（中田ヤスタカ）took care of everything here. One observation I have to make here is that considering SoCoPo's breakup in 2002, they were still pretty darn active. Another is that although the upbeat perkiness of Shibuya-kei is showing its echo in "Life Style Music", I think the song is definitely more of a harbinger of capsule's stylistic future.

Sonic Coaster Pop -- Summer in the Pool

Wikimedia Commons
 Chr Grundo

Supposedly, we're in the final day of what has been a short heat wave here in Toronto. The public swimming pools are now open, but on the first day of the tropical temperatures and humidity, several of them weren't, much to panting people's chagrin due to sudden staffing issues which got the mayor in some hot water. But things are much more copacetic now.

About a month ago, I introduced a duo by the name of Sonic Coaster Pop which put forth their brand of technopop for a few years between 1999 and 2002. However, maybe that time frame is mistaken since they also put out an album in 2004 titled "Super Miracle Circuit". 

In any case, one track from this album is "Summer in the Pool". My first article on SoCoPo dealt with their "Usagi-chan Dancin'!"（ウサギチャンダンシン!）which brought together their technopop, some Shibuya-kei and maybe even some Precure theme excitement. "Summer in the Pool" is more attenuated in that it sounds like a very pure and crystalline synth number, something that one would hear in a video game. The pool water would be pink and the sky would be orange.

Sonic Coaster Pop -- Usagi-chan Dancin'!（ウサギチャンダンシン!）

 

I don't know much about this duo known as Sonic Coaster Pop (or SoCoPo) that had its run between 1999 and 2002 but they were categorized as being part of the Akishibu-kei（アキシブ系）hybrid genre of Shibuya-kei rhythms as applied to anime and game music, which was (and maybe still is) concentrated in Tokyo's pop culture Akihabara district. Akira Suzuki and Chinatsu Furukawa were the two here and they provided their music through a number of releases and compilations.

One such compilation came out apparently after SoCoPo's disbanding. "Good compi" was released in 2003 under abcdefg*record and the second track is "Usagi-chan Dancin'" (Little Rabbit Dancin'). It's a bouncy number, and as one person said on one site: "Think YMCK meets Perfume." I would probably push further on that analogy and posit that it can be a mix of YMO bleeps and bloops, Pizzicato Five's Shibuya-kei paint-the-town-red arrangement and a bunch of Precure vocalists on a major bender. The music video above is such that I can even suggest some Vaporwave (I do remember that Pocari Sweat commercial with Sae Isshiki). It's like tripping the light fantastic in a digital world.

(7:13)