Tuesday, April 28, 2009

30 Minutes Over Tokyo - Box Of Delights



Taking advantage of the current strong yen, I finally got the majority of the rest of my treasured record collection (well, the vinyl part anyway) shipped over last week.

The records had lain dormant in my brother's bedroom for the last 7 years, untouched, un-played but by no means unloved. To commemorate my tearful re-union with said pieces of wax, I was going to do a normal 'Spill post. But as I became lost in the reminisces (I know, I know it's only 7 years!), I thought it would be fun to expand it into a full podcast and share a few memories.

All tracks were purchased (but not necessarily released) between 1998 and 2002, when I was living a stone's throw away from the beautiful piece of architecture you can see at the top of this post.

As usual, comments and criticisms are all welcome.

30MOT - Box Of Delights Part A
30MOT - Box Of Delights Part B


N.B. I've put it on Boxstr and in Dropbox, and i've also put the individual tracks into Dropbox too. This does spoil the surprise a bit, but whenever I listen to other people's podcasts there are always a few tracks that i'd like to have for myself, so I thought i'd drop 'em in for whoever wants them.

38 comments:

treefrogdemon said...

Tuesday's question: what's the connection between this post and the word 'scrobbled', beloved of LastFM?

tincanman said...

Haven't had time to listen yet, but love the way you have packaged this up for us.

Luke-sensei said...

@tincanman - it's all down to your good self. Dropbox is indeed a wonderful thing.

@TFD - Blackadder III ??????

Abahachi said...

Sorry, you're really not going to persuade me - and certainly not with that track - that Elastica's second album wasn't a terrible mistake that threatens to besmirch the reputation of an otherwise wonderful band; I frequently try to pretend that they only ever made the one album. Other than that, enjoyed this a lot, though (apart from Atari Teenage Riot and their ilk) it's a fair way away from my usual stuff.

Blampo MacFringe said...

Aaaargh! Can't wait to listen! Unfrtunately I'm about to embark on a lengthy shoot, dagnabbit!!

SatanKidneyPie said...

Just listened to part 1. Excellent stuff so far. Brought back a lot of good memories.

On the subject of Elastica, I agree that the second album was hugley disappointing, but I don't think that their first album was the last good thing that they did: I thought that the 6-track EP they released not long before the second album was rather ace.

Luke-sensei said...

Looks like i'm on on my own with "The Menace", but I still urge any doubters to give it another go!........oh, alright then!

@Abahachi - i was hoping you would put me put me out of my misery re: the Cobra Killer track. I'm sure that "sookie sookie man" is some kind of jazz or maybe blues track from a long time ago...?

Thnx 4 listening y'all!

BTW, tomorrow is a bank holiday and i've just come back from the pub, which is the only place in Tokyo that sells John Smiths........it's the small things in life.......

goneforeign said...

This is a good place for me to ask a question that's been on my mind for a while. What are the relative advantages of Boxstr and Dropbox over Podbean. I've never used either, intimidated from the start and I have a couple of posts almost ready to go both of which need more space than my usual Podbean allows.
If Chris knows the answers and can come up with clear step by step instructions as he did last week I'd be delighted to try either.

nilpferd said...

Sookie, Sookie was covered by Grant Green among others, and originally written by Don Covay.The Grant Green track was often sampled during the nineties.

Luke-sensei said...

thanks Nilpferd....although I can't get the Spotify links unfortunately...

nilpferd said...

OK, I just dropboxed Grant Green into your 30MOT file... can't do the same with Don Covay, unfortunately. Someone is bound to have it..

ejaydee said...

I put Don Covay's in the box of delights, as well as Tina Britt's version.
Enjoying this podcast as always, it was nice to hear Electrelane, I saw them once in concert and my then girlfriend and me fell in love with the guitarist for a moment.

ejaydee said...

GF: both dropbox and boxstr have their advantages. In short, boxstr has a much bigger storage capacity than podbean, and you can do simultaneous uploads. Also it's simple enough to then add the HTML code to your post. The good thing with dropbox, is that we can share whole folders (so it's like we all sharing the same podbean accout for example). Also you can see all the files in your desktop on your desktop. Moreover, we can keep things between us, which was useful during the Maddy project for example, or the Album of The Week. My only problem with dropbox, is that it's a bit more convoluted to share a file, but I have used both.

treefrogdemon said...

@Japanther: nope

Shoey said...

Is "embark on a lengthy shoot" a euphemism, I wonder?

Tom said...

Cheers for the dedication, Japanther. I've not heard The Claw for ages, so it was good to hear it again. Was listening to part 2 on the train home and hearing my name mentioned made me blush!

Blimpy said...

Woohoo - 30MOT is go! That Deltron track is aces, it must have been so exciting to have the crate turn up!

Ironically Campag Velocet are all drug-dealing postmen these days.

Oh, I do like a blast o' hardcore every now and again.

Aha, now I can join in the Elastica debate - I LOVE ELASTICA TOO - even their second album - I think it suffered from being a. too late and b. being ahead of its time in terms of music trends. Does that make any sense? Probs not, I know what I mean though. Their cover of Da Da Da ranks in my all time favourite covers top 50 certainly.

Electrelane are one of those bands that never quite did it for me, I am still to hear their one supersonic take off tune. Any noms?

Excellent date story - it probably was her oot the Kills. Brothers In Sound sound a bit like a southern Arab Strap, nice.

Digital Hardcore with no blastbeats or drill'n'bass - now I've heard it all!!!!

Man I really don't remember Ten Benson sounding like that!

Fantastic podcast, Japanther, I really enjoyed all of that! I bet there's a few more podcasts in that crate alone, though?

Any time is King Biscuit Time.

goneforeign said...

Ejay: If I load a file of several cuts into dropbox how do I then transfer them into a 'new post' here?
Is there a 'how to' file somewhere?

ejaydee said...

Blimp, have you tried Take the Bit between Your Teeth? Or their version of I'm on Fire, or Enter Laughing, or On Paraded even?

ejaydee said...

GF: that's the tricky bit, I think Tin did a little how-to, but I'm not sure if it was on the 'Spill or in an email.
Basically, assuming you've got the dropbox folder on your desktop. In Finder, Copy, don't drag, files into the RR Dropbox subfolder. That means you're sharing stuff inside the dropbox and the rest of us have access to it. Now make another copy of the file and paste it into the "Public" sub folder, still in the Dropbox folder. Once a file is in the "public" folder, right-click and choose Dropbox-> Copy public link.
That link acts as a hyper link. So, back to your browser, in your blog post, highlight, say, the title of a song, click the hyperlink icon in the toolbar of the textbox, and paste the URL which you copied from your "public" folder.

I hope that makes sense.

steenbeck said...

I haven't had a chance to listen yet, because I've got the Blimpcast cued up (I'm 10 minutes in and loving it so far!) but I wanted to tell Goneforeign that I actually followed Nilpferd/Chris's advice from last week to make the dropbox playlist on the spill. You have to upload the MP3 into dropbox, as Ejay has directed--although I do believe you can upload it directly to your public folder if that's the one you click on. Anyway, once it's in your public folder, do as Ejay did (wwed?) and apple-click on it and choose copy public URL. Now you have to copy that into the Guardian link where the URL would go, and you can go ahead and type the name in between the arrows. And if I have a bunch of them, I open two windows, copy them all to my spillbox, then copy and paste down the line with each bit of HTML...

This has probably confused the issue, but I hope not.

goneforeign said...

Ejay: That sounds as though it makes sense, I'll give it a go. Thank You.

Luke-sensei said...

@Tom - glad you were listening mate! Lots of good memories for me too. Ah....feels like we are getting old!

@SKP - that 6 track EP WAS ace wasn't it? Can't find my copy....

@Tin & Ejaydee - thanks for dropping those in - not sure they resembled the Cobra Killer track in any way, but excellent tunes in their own right. Loved that nice long Grant Green track.

@Blimpy - thanks for all the comments. I'll add to Ejaydee's Electrelane list, "Come on" and "I Wanna Be President" are both incredible songs. I'll drop the latter into the 30MOT folder later, unfortunately my 7" of the former is scratched to buggery and won't play. But Tom might have it.......???
Campag Velocet as drug-dealing postmen!! You are probably dead right there!
Thanks for the Menace support. "Da Da Da" is indeed a great cover, plus a Mark E Smith collaboration and the brutal intimacy of "My Sex", what's not to like?!
For some really mellow Digital Hardcore try Christophe De Babalon's "If You're Into It, I'm Out Of It" album (the clue is in the title). Mrs J accused me of listening to "healing music" when I put it on one night, "but it's on Digital Hardcore" I spat back, to which she replied by staring blankly at me for a few seconds before resuming her magazine reading.

Shoegazer said...

Best one yet I think? Great picks & thanks for throwing the tunes in the box. With you on the 2nd Elastica album, but mainly because the 1st one had so many direct & uncredited lifts from Wire -- did they think nobody would notice? -- that it spoilt enjoyment of a great album.

Tom said...

I do have Electrelane's Come On. On 7" so I'll need to covert it to mp3. Don't think I'll get a chance to do that until the weekend. I'll dropbox it into the 30MOT folder. Of course, that does risk me giving away my closely guarded true identity...

Blimpy said...

There seems to be quite a lot of Electrelane on Spotify, so I'll check out the noms when I can, thanks SpillHiveMind!

TracyK said...

Hmmm, I think Japanther was listening to an awful lot of Peel in the mid-late 90s, I recognised almost everything that you played! Great to hear The Claw again and Campag Velocet sounded, in retrospect,an awful lot like Flowered Up's Weekender reprised. By the way, where this Tokyo bar that sells John Smith? Could have done with knowing that back then!

Luke-sensei said...

@TracyK - Guilty as charged on the Peel front. The man remains my all-time hero and I hope that i'm still listening to noise and breakcore (or whatever form of extreme music comes between now and then) when i reach 65.

Just a short stroll from the flat to somewhere near Yotsuya for a nice glass of grossly overpriced John Smiths. Where and when were you in Tokyo?

nilpferd said...

Nice 'cast, I enjoyed most of the more electronic stuff, and some of the more thrashy bits. I had some flatmates who were into Atari Teenage Riot, it was almost nostalgic to hear them again.

TracyK said...

I like that qualifying 'almost' there Nilpf! I was living in Odakyu-Sagamihara between November 2003 and April 2005: Jon and I worked for (boo! Hiss!) Nova, myself in Azamino, which I think people there class as Yokohama and Jon at Aobadai and Ichigao (Den-Entoshi line, basically). I also worked through the goverment programme with Nova at an elementary school in Togoshikoen. We travelled all around that area sightseeing, like Kamakura and Enoshima, as well as taking trips to Oshino at the base of Fuji (hubby climbed it, I sketched the springs), Kyoto and Hiroshima. We struggled very much with the language but loved the people and the country. I danced onstage at Shibuya AX with Belle and Sebastian, we went to Club QUattro to see Bright Eyes and Hope of the States play and my Taiwanese friend took me to Daikanyama to see the Scissor Sisters. I soooo miss Japan! What do you do out there?

nilpferd said...

I should add that the "almost" had more to do with my former flatmates than with ATR, of whom I was quite fond..

treefrogdemon said...

You've all given up, haven't you? (On Tuesday's question, I mean.) It's now Thursday so I shall reveal ...

...that (as far as I know - it's not in the new Chambers) John Masefield invented the word 'scrobble' in his two children's books The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, written in the 1920s. If I remember rightly, when the hero Kay Harker got kidnapped the bad guys 'scrobbled' him up in a sack.

Luke-sensei said...

@TFD - "scrobble" is indeed a great word. The TV adaptation was a favourite as a kid.

@nilpferd - thanks for listening!

@TracyK - like your good self, I pulled in a few years under the auspices of the pink bunny, mainly in central Tokyo; Takadanobaba, Ikebukuro and Shinjuku. These days i'm exclusively Business English, which involves traveling all over Tokyo to the shiny towers of modern capitalism and doing my bit to ensure that the wheels of global finance are greased and that tomorrow's captains of industry can pronounce their "R's". This makes me semi-freelance, so I divide my time about 70%/30% between that and helping Mrs J run her/our business, which is a small shop, that requires a lot of hard work! Oh...and add another 10% for buggering about on the internet!
How did I miss all of those gigs you went to??!

Blimpy said...

Box Of Delights still scares the beejeeesus outta me.

TracyK said...

Argh! Nova usgai! What a terrifying little pink bastard he was, very very sinister. I didn't thrive under the auspices of the Japanese business system. Hubby was running his two branches one year in, I was voice co-ordinator for my branch but failed to get a raise because I clashed HUGELY with our gung-ho, boneheaded American boss Will. What a knobend...My counter-claim against him work though, he got moved, to no-one's surprise or regret.
We used to go to Takadanobaba for The Blue Parrot, my reading habit needed to be fed! I liked my routine so much: rise at 9ish, go to Machida to the internet cafe, curriman or similar for 'ranchi', can of hot royal milk tea and the Daily Yomiuri on the way to work...I loved seeing Fuji from the train every weekend morning too. Sigh...
What kind of shop do you and the Mrs have?

Luke-sensei said...

Sounds lovely Tracy, and of course I have visited the Blue Parrot on more than a few occasions. I have to sheepishly admit to rarely venturing outside of the Yamanote Line these days, I live a bicycle-centric life inside the unreal bubble of central Tokyo!

The shop sells Scandinavian retro/antique stuff, hence the trips to Sweden/Finland/Denmark 3 times a year, which sounds nice, but is near-constant work with a couple of hours sleep a night! And now is not the best of times to be a small business owner......

p.s. "Royal" milk tea!! What is that all about eh?? I like it hot, but wouldn't consider drinking a cold one! Cold milk tea??!

TracyK said...

But you can get royal milk tea Haagen-Dazs can't you? That's nice, but then, it's just sweet and creamy, so...I sometimes buy yokan at the Japanese centre in London so that when we study Japan in class I can give the kids a taste: I love their tempted little faces, because it does look so yummy, followed by bitter disappointment once they've tried it. "More?" "Um, no ta, Miss..."
I can understand the not straying outside of your area thing, neighbourhoods are pretty self-contained, though the Japanese are very fond of going to a particular town just to try 'the best noodles' or 'the best cakes', aren't they? I should imagine Scandinavian design is popular in Japan, I know there was a cool shop near me which sold 50s coffe tables and atomic clocks, etc.

Ginno said...

Japanther! Cool name matey! Hey, I tried the two links, neither of them worked. Is it cos I is usin' Firefox?

Imitation?? I think I'll forget you said that, but I'm really curious to hear which part of your podcast I supposedly imitated!

I'm sure your music choices were cooler than mine anyway! Please let me know how to access those podcasts!

g6