Thursday, February 17, 2011

Finding the Freaks

Over the years, I've developed pretty sophisticated freak radar.  After six months in Tokyo, slowly circling and infiltrating and honing in, I finally struck real gold last night.
This is an unfortunately pretty crummy cel-phone picture of Zool.Gel, aka Keito Suzuki (Japanese blog), playing at Nantoka Bar, an anarchist spot in Koenji I'm going to write more about soon.  That is a fountain of red goop descending from a shelf.  It dripped and plopped throughout his intense set, which included earphone-mics shoved into jars of goop, lots of looping effects, and most of all, this amazing hand-blown glass water-flute that produced some tremendously weird bird-like sounds.
As good as the show was, though, the weirdest part was the connection - Keito is part of the band Topping Bottoms, which put out some tapes on the Not Not Fun label.  That's the same label that put out a fair amount of stuff from Racoo-oo-oon and some other Iowa-ish bands that I wrote about for Signal to Noise last year.
I feel like I've finally found My People - especially since Zool.Gel also makes weird hip hop beats.

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