Urbantage

(Still from the video "Wamono" by Hifana)

While rummaging through some email folders, I found a YouTube link (below) that Bug sent me a year ago showing the art crew, Rinpa Eshidan, painting a wall over a span of a week. It is a sequence of time lapse shots with three songs playing in the background. It's pretty nifty!

("1 Week of Artworks," Rinpa Eshidan)

The first song is "Music is Mine" by Nujabes (Jun Seba). The song was reminiscent of Ryuichi Sakamoto's music from the mid-1990s. It must be the piano, synthesizer, beat...I guess almost everything! Nujabes has collaborated with others and created the soundtrack to one of my favorite anime series, Samurai Champloo.

The second song caught my fancy, "Wamono," by Hifana ("southern wind" in Okinawan). Off of their 2nd cd, "Channel H," which was released in 2005, the song mixes hip hop, and Japanese and Okinawan folk music. I don't care much for most hip hop, but the layer of Okinawan music made it pretty catchy.

+cruz from London-based, Love, worked on the majority of the animation on "Channel H," under the W+K Tokyo Lab record label. The video link for "Wamono" (below) from YouTube is low quality. A more watchable version (34 MB) can be downloaded directly from Love.

("Wamono" by Hifana)

From watching a few clips of live performances of Hifana, the two men seem pretty active on stage, even though they are percussionists/mixers. Reading an interview, it mentions that they do not pre-program their music when performing live!

(Still from the video "Wamono" by Hifana)

- Cassaendra