The Tokyo Concert Experience

  More than fifteen years ago I got a chance to catch a performance of Steve Reich’s Different Trains while I was on a business trip in Miami. To this day that performance remains near the top among the most emotionally intense I’ve ever seen. I remember seeing people sobbing along the string quartet recurring build up throughout the piece. The distinct voice of Reich’s former nanny and that of a holocaust survivor, both describing train rides done during wartime in different parts of the planet, offered a testimony that was both eloquent and touching. This juxtaposition that combines the natural rhythm of speaking patterns with the unrelenting train-like string accompaniment, painted a clear picture of horror, injustice and technology hand in hand. William Basinski is another master of this kind of descriptive music that translates sounds into images within a wider context. Take for instance his best known work, The Disintegration Loops , in which a loop from found sound element...

  To say that Zepp Haneda is far is, in my case, an understatement. I live in West Tokyo and that venue is next to the airport. Felt like it took forever to get there. It’s an area that’s being developed with shopping malls and such, possibly to turn it into a second Odaiba. It’s hip and cool like the audience for the sold out show tonight. The shows I go to don’t usually sell out, the atmosphere at this gig here was unlike the ones I’m used to. If you look at the pictures posted on the band’s Instagram, where they document the vibe at each place they perform with photographs -excellent ones, I might add- of random audience members, you can tell that Tokyo in particular felt more like a fashion show than any other stop of the tour. Me in my hoodie and my old ass haven’t felt this out of place in ages. It’s weird because it seems like the concept of Khruangbin is to represent every corner of the world, everyone in general. They don’t only have a diverse lineup, their music itself h...

  The poignant anecdote of how the late Ronald McNair refused to leave a segregated library when he was child until a racist librarian called the cops that eventually allowed him to take the books home, is well known and kind of a social media fixture. It’s definitely a moving story all the more powerful due to who McNair ended up being. The second African-American astronaut, who died in the tragic 1986 Challenger explosion that took the lives of the entire crew; quite possibly the most diverse ever assembled until that point. The crew included two women, one Asian and one African American. One of the women was Christa McAuliffe, she was scheduled to be the first private citizen to travel to space.  “Black astronaut, cop a space suit and jet off my steps Challenger launch burning bright, burn to death Burn in the firmament, charbroiled, catch the hair Black boy burned crisp, pursed black lips Black marionettes dance limp, over the pit The kindly ones distant as the winter's su...