Robot Action Boy

just after i posted last week’s chart, the new audioscrobbler chart was posted. obviously i’ve been listening to a lot of red chamber. i’m craving more too.

i’m not sure how long this is going to be up, but the 1972 rock album by yma sumac miracles is available for download here. quite a bit different from her earlier work, but not without a certain appeal. somehow i doubt we’ll be seeing a legit re-issue of this anytime soon. via pcl linkdump.

this week’s audioscrobbler chart. audioscrobbler has been having lots of problems, so many in fact that the new chart is due about now, but i only just got this last one a day or so ago. 6 out of my top 10 are japanese bands. seems like a long time since i’ve listened to so much japanese stuff.

today was the second and final day of the grass festival. there seemed to be a few more people today than yesterday, but i felt like the music was weaker. the one big exception to this was the marshmallow kisses – a band from hk. they were the one band i was really looking forward to seeing and despite some technical glitches they were alot of fun. they said they’d be coming back to taiwan. i’d really like to see them in a proper club(ie smaller venue). musically they seemed to fall somewhere between shibuya-kei and siesta. not a bad place to be at all.

mack and i also took a good look over some of the merchandise for sale. at the noble music table they were giving away a comp of stuff they distribute if you bought two of their cds, but once they found out about mack’s site and he gave them his business card about it they gave us each a free sampler. hmm, free stuff for a webpage? maybe i should get blogging business cards made up and see if the free stuff flies at me? sadly, what i’ve heard off the sampler so far isn’t doing that much for me.

after the festival we walked to shida and went to owl listen space. a really cool place i’ll have to write up a whole post on one day. it’s basically a book/cd/record shop as well as a coffee/tea shop. we spent quite a bit of time having the boss play us various records to see if mack wanted to buy them. most of which we listened to he ended up buying. the vinyl prices weren’t bad. the second hand cds seemed to be a bit pricey though – at least the ones i was interested in.

this morning before the music festival mack and i hit the flea market. mack bought a bunch of records and once again i was amazed at how nice everyone there is. complete strangers came up to us and gave us advice on bargaining. it was great. i only came away with one thing – the record pictured above(click it to see the full cover image at a larger size). at first we thought they had taken two seperate albums and spliced front and back covers together because the front cover doesn’t seem to match the bands featured on the back cover(perez prado, kai warner, paul mauriet, etc), but then we noticed the title fantastic brass world by rocking drum and realized this was how it was supposed to be. once peter and i get our turntable set up again i’ll be able to listen to it, but in the meantime i can admire the cover.

today i went with mack to the grass festival. of the bands i saw i think the japanese band hazel nuts chocolate was my favourite. they were really fun. they had white boards set up where the singer would draw pictures to explain or introduce the songs(unfortunately, it wasn’t always easy to see what she had written). in one song she got out some finger puppets to play along with the song. the band is basically one woman, but she had brought along one of the members of the aprils for this show. seeing them perfrom reminded me of seeing pizzicato five. something about how fun and friendly they are. they seemed to be quite popular with the audience judging by the large line of people waiting to buy their cd and/or get autographs.

another highlight of the day was the hk band my little airport. they did two velvet underground covers( femme fatale and stephanie says) during their set and their songs seemed to go from quirky to more standard indie-pop.

another band i dug was dolly’s pillbox. girl indie-pop. made me think of a shoegazer version of the marine girls which is not a bad thing to be.

expat blog. a directory of expats blogging from all over the world. the site’s in its infancy, but if you are an expat and blog you may want to add your site to the directory. there’s also a forum on the site but i haven’t checked it out much yet.

i guess it was naieve of me to believe that we might be beyond such stupidity as this, but apparently not. some people were invited to a special screening of the new tim burton film only to later be told they couldn’t enter because of being dressed goth. how can the way someone is dressed even matter for such an event? via yip yop.

according to this site(via everlasting blort) this hello kitty guitar is rare. well, maybe in some parts of the world. but when mack and i walked into an instrument shop on sunday, there were several just sitting there waiting to be bought. funny when i see something in real life and then just a few days read about it on a blog. i’ve never really craved a guitar – now a theremin, that’s a completely different matter.

the scheldule for the taipei international film festival is up. there are lots of russian films playing. looking through the scheldule i’m not sure what to see. i always feel a bit overwhelmed by these sort of things. the good news is that most films have english subtitles. the online scheldule is a bit clearer about which films have english subs and which don’t. in the paper scheldule i picked up last weekend the wording was a bit odd, and they gave films a star if they had no english subs.

if anyone has any suggestions for what i should see, feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.