Another great Tokyo video via Jamaica (WN0021)

Tokyo & Yokohama - A High Speed Journey from Andreas Doppelmayr on Vimeo.

Following on from the last post of time lapse Tokyo footage comes another via the same source.

Andreas Doppelmayr, a Norway-based photographer and traveller, has put together the rather fabulous film above that shows certain highlights from both Tokyo and Yokohama. I was very impressed that he was able to get this much great footage after just a few nights in town and the film made me miss the crazy old place once again.

My source to these fine films is known as Jamaipanese, a Kingston-based blogger who seems to be Jamaica's number one Japanophile. We've chatted briefly over Twitter, but little else yet. I thoroughly recommend his blog though, for a different outsider's perspective on Japan.

Shelf Life get some new fans

When you're signed up to several internet services at the same time, a lot of the mail that fills your inbox tends to come from these sites. Out of the personal email that I get on a regular basis, probably only about 5-10% is from friends or family. Pretty much how it is with physical mail through the door really.

Like many of the sites that I have some kind of presence on (far too many according to my wife, and she may well have a point) I get a weekly email from iLike.com, which tells me of the activity that's gone on at my Shelf Life profile. I've done very little in terms of promoting this profile so far, and that email usually tells me that nothing's happened since nothing last happened.

Today's email alerted me to Shelf Life having gained two new fans. Although it's easy to get pretty cynical after a while with social media ('Barack Obama is your friend on MySpace!', 'Madonna is following you on Twitter!', etc...oh really?), I was rather pleased with this little gem. After all, someone somewhere in the world had presumably dug my band's tunes enough to nail their colours to the flag.

The band also appears to be making a little bit of progress over at the iTunes Japan store. No idea who's buying downloads of our songs and no word from iTunes about it yet either, but I'm guessing that a maximum popularity rating must translate into sales somewhere down the line.


It seems to me that one of the many paradoxes of the web is that with user-generated content (UGC), you've still got to push and promote things that you do and make but at the same time it's far too easy to get distracted, waylaid and sent off in a different direction from that which was intended (thus making it harder to concentrate on one task, such as promoting some content).

As C&M put it, 'Build it and They Will Come' was never a good maxim for the web. While it's great that a creator in the internet age can bypass all the traditional channels of content distribution and connect directly with their audience (and therefore customers), without some form of effective promotion of that content, it's just another lonely file in a vast, vast ocean of bytes.

In the case of music, many artists have long been aware that the industry is stacked pretty heavily against them (see Courtney Love's famed diatribe against the music industry for further background, if you've not come across it before), and making a decent living from making music is about as easy as finding a large community of expat Americans in Pyongyang.

Even though the industry itself is still fighting hard in their losing battle against the existence of the internet, musicians of the digital generation are blessed like no other musicians that have gone before them. They can instantly connect to a global audience and set the terms themselves, without getting stung by contracts where they might scrape a few cents together over the years they produce their work. Most of this new generation would likely have little or no conception of how many hoops they'd have to go through and milestones they'd have to pass to even get a song played on the radio in the 50's or on TV in the 70's.

However, this amounts to absolutely nothing if there's no promotion behind it (possibly the best future path for savvy record companies is to mutate into online PR and marketing agencies, once they've monetised new models of operation, to help today's up-and-coming minstrels to get heard above the tsunamis of tunes available online). And the 'blip generation' gets so easily distracted by the myriad of media channels and producers of content all simultaneously vying for their attention that it's much harder for a band to both build a loyal core audience and to find the time to push themselves through all the channels open to them.

Still, if you're not expecting to make enough money from downloads etc that you'll be able to retire from the day job early, it's a great feeling to throw some tunes out there and eventually have them found and dug by someone!

Pecha Kucha Night in Brighton

Dr Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry, 'Computer games as experimental art?'

I went along to the second Brighton Pecha Kucha Night tonight. I'd been wanting to go along to one of these events for a while as I'd come across the name in Tokyo, discovered that it had become a bit of a worldwide thing (happening now in 210 cities around the world) and I'm always interested in a Brighton contribution to a global event.

There was also a bit of a personal connection too. The format, where a series of presenters speak in front of a live audience showing 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, was first devised in 2003 by Japan-based designers Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham to show their work and attract people to their exhibition space, Super-Deluxe. This experimental art space/nightclub is in Tokyo's Roppongi area, a part of the city that is simultaneously sleazy and high class, and is one of the few parts of Tokyo where Japanese and non-Japanese mix and mingle with each other quite freely.

The first Pecha Kucha Night was held in 2003, the year that I arrived in Tokyo. Three years later, I held my own event at Super-Deluxe, a launch party for the 'Peace Not War Japan' CD co-organised with the record label. I also got to perform that same evening, DJing as Control K and singing 'Imagine' with some of the members of Shelf Life. It was probably around then that I began to pick up the name Pecha Kucha, which roughly translates from the Japanese as 'chit-chat'.

It was a muggy evening in Brighton tonight, though nowhere near the oppressive humidity of a Tokyo summer, and the event was being held at Redroaster - an airless coffee house at the beginning of Kemptown. Already packed with punters by the time we arrived, there was no choice but to stand at the back and strain a little to hear the speakers, who were mostly all a little underconfident with microphone technique.

Nirmal Dhiman, 'Visual diary drawings'

Most of the presenters were artists of some sort but although some of the talks were quite interesting or engaging, we left during the interval. I was satisfied that I'd got enough of a flavour of the event, dug the format and was in the company of a wife who was feeling the stuffiness of the room so was happy not to stick around.

It's definitely a good format for spoken word events or presentations, as it cuts out any chance of waffle and gives presenters a standard that they all have to keep to, whoever they might be. The programming of speakers is a very important element of these events too. Tonight felt a little too much like a series of art college end-of-term presentations for my liking, though that was both appropriate for Brighton and seemed to go down well with the audience.

I do however applaud each of them for going up and giving it a go, particularly as I suppose that visual artists don't tend to spend much time speaking in front of live audiences. And I'll certainly keep an eye out for future ones - you never know how these things could develop.

Now, TED talks in Brighton...that would really be something I'd stick around till the end for.

Time lapse Tokyo (WN0020)

static : pulse from Samuel Cockedey on Vimeo.

Bit by bit, slowly but surely, I'm about to start moving with more online activity after the recent hiatus. Following at least a month away from being permanently online, I'm now connected again.

Although it feels good to be back and I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some of the things I've been missing out on, being offline has also been positive in other ways. I've noticed the birds singing more, I've got a little sunburnt and have been having more face-to-face-conversations with actual people rather than through an internet-enabled device.

I think that it'll have to be a bit more selective and productive this time around, with less time spent just jumping from place to place. Easier said than done once temptation is laid out, but I'll give it a go.

Before I begin getting busy again with what's up in Brighton and the shape of my new life, here's a video I recently came across with some beautiful time-lapse photography of Tokyo. Can't beat those sunsets and cityscapes in my book. Thanks to Jamaipanese for pointing the way and to Samuel Cockedey for putting in the graft.