Taste Like Honey: Reminiscences from the Αlbum Εra

Aoki Takamasa – Indigo Rose

There was a time of self-imposed forced experimentation with electronic music. It was a conscious struggle. No such thing as a dilemma, it was all perfect clear to me: I had to give up guitar music in order to embrace the future. I craved for a (retro)futuristic future back then as much I do now; I once dreamt of flying cars, I now dream of cyborgs.

To put it shorty, there were no reservations. There were setbacks though; as hard as I tried, replacing riffs with beats and loops wasn’t an option via Legowelt. I wore Tiga’s sunglasses at night for a few times but to no avail. Even the ingenious  and resourceful Aphex Twin couldn’t open that door to me. Intelligent dance music sounded cool but it was way too brainy for me and as for disco, I always found it distressing to navigate the dancefloor.

With hindsight, I could have known from the start. Less is more, and what other better place other than Japan for one to endorse minimalism, the spiritual music of our times for the non-believers.

 

 

 

Taste Like Honey: Reminiscences from the Αlbum Εra

The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

I’m at the exit door staring at a brave new world where music is not exclusively performed by white American and British men and the soundtrack of my life is not restricted to the sounds of guitar, bass and drums. I just don’t know it yet! Before I’m about to pull the plug on a style of music, more than this, to a way of seeing, I met the Beatles.

My initiation took place at a friend’s living room where I watched the Beatles Anthology.  Those were twelve intense hours of nonstop inspiration, it was also a view to the burdens of a creative life. I must admit, it took me some time till I finally stopped thinking of Yoko Ono as partly responsible for the band’s break up. After all, if it was a woman’s fault that should have been Linda McCartney – it was her father that craved to manage the Beatles brand. And yet, no one should be blamed for what it was simply the natural course of things for a group of four working class lads from Liverpool that became… the Beatles!

As for Sergeant Pepper, he was a kind of peace-broker between a man’s inner hippy and the type of the homo urbanus produced by modernistic art factories such as the one Andy Warhol used to operate.

Our world is indeed one, just as hippies like to envision it:

people crave for Coca Cola in a remote village of Mozambique, the Japanese made baseball their national sport, and in the late 19^th century the Chinese challenged the millennia-old doctrines of Confucianism in order to catch up with the modernization process of the West;

but at the same time, hundreds of millions of Westerners, and Western-minded citizens from any country of the world, manage to survive the existential stress of everyday life with a little of help of Eastern ancient yoga breathing techniques.

Indeed, the world sees through the eyes of the West and breaths through the lungs of the East.