Simulacra + Vera Icon-Summer in Tokyo Part I

Simulacra + Vera Icon-The Changcutters at 代々木公園 10.07.11

Spending summer in cities is such a bittersweet experience. I've spent most of my summers stuck in a city, usually mastering how to be a hermit extraordinaire, accidentally picking up flawless planking skills along the way. Nowadays, it's a long process to get myself out of the house mostly due to my contemplating until the very last minute, in my full makeup(for some reason, it makes sense to walk around looking like a drag queen in this humidity) and outfits, whether I really want to tear myself away from my beloved AC or not.

In my teens + early 20's, one of the very few things that got me out of my hole voluntarily during the humid, scorching hot weather was a gig, which is one of the upsides of staying in a concrete jungle in this awful weather. It's been a long time since I've spent my summer in NY but fortunately, Tokyo has no shortage of great gigs, albeit much more expensive than its NY counterparts.

Years ago, before I had a chance to attend any gig in Japan, some bands who had played here told me about the superb lighting systems and Tokyo is indeed gig photographers' wet dream; even the dingy looking venues are equipped with astonishing lighting, making it so easy to snap away.

The audience however leaves much to be desired, mostly because of the reserved, collectivistic nature of the culture. People dance and clap in unison, not one person doing a thing out of line. For someone who's used to mosh pits full of sweat, blood, screaming, cheering, beer/water/whatever liquid being thrown around, crowd-surfing, stage-diving-basically, chaotic fun bordering a bedlam, here, it's rather...tame.(whereas NY is full of bores who are "too cool" to enjoy themselves).

This is where The Changcutters come in-leave it to the Indonesian expats + band to deliver proper fun in Japan. It's been such a long time since I've been to a gig with a properly energetic audience so I was a bit awestruck. The videos and these pics don't really do justice to demonstrate how much fun they are live-imagine the Indonesia's answer to The Hives but with an even better frontman(sorry Pelle) who can perhaps best described as Pelle Almqvist meets Dennis Lyxzén-but let's face it, I have never seen anyone who "dances" as well as Lyxzén.

Simulacra + Vera Icon-...And You Will Know Us By the Trail Of Dead

A surprised Conrad Keely thanks you for your time. (Marry me already, Conrad Keely) haha

A few more pictures on my flickr.

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You might be wondering why you are seeing pics from a gig in my mostly travel-related blog. Well, my intention for this blog is to be about music, art, travel and my life in general, but I haven't really gotten around to cover much of the other elements.

Before I left the States, gigs use to be a huge part of my life, which I constantly missed while I was abroad.(You can find my gig pics on various websites) Since I've been back, I haven't been able to attend as many as I would have liked due to my limited funding, but I managed to go to 3 gigs within a week of my arrival.

I've seen ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail Of Dead several times in three different cities and by far, this was the best one I've seen, mainly because it was at one of my favorite venues in the world, First Unitarian Church-an actual church-basement. It's an intimate, scorchingly-hot church venue that doubles as a day care during the day-hence the alphabet carpet on stage haha. Back in my high school days, where many bands were either skipping the city or playing at a bar, R5 Productions was one promoter that booked all-ages shows at the church. Since most of the city was apathetic towards this kind of music, we got either lucky and saw the bands at tiny venues in comparison to other major cities or the band skipped the city altogether. I highly recommend you to check it out if you want to see some good live gig.