Kametron has three modes. In "Kametron" mode he just sits in a corner listening to music with a pair of headphones, not terribly exciting. In "Taiko Kametron" mode he stands up and removes a pair of batchi from a secret compartment. In "Giga Kametron" mode massive speakers come out of his fore arms pounding music. The resulting energy surge usually shorts out his CPU causing him to twitch and dance uncontrollably.
Our good friends at San Jose Taiko team up with bay area DJ group Bangerz for a song about robots!
Okay so usually I would NOT turn OnEnsemble.org into an advertisement for anything but I feel compelled to let you all know know that I found something I thought I would never find: mainland shave ice that doesn’t suck! For years and years I’ve been wondering why it’s so hard to make shave ice like Hawaii’s famous Matsumotos or my personal favorite Waiola’s.
When I lived in Hawai’i going to Waiola’s was a religious experience. Inspired by chado I sought perfection in the ritual of my own shave ice ceremony. To arrive fully with all of your senses in a single moment to enjoy the pleasure of a lychee shave ice is to attain some kind of modern day enlightenment. (more…)
We’ve just got news that Yamasong will be shown at the upcoming Dragon*Con Film Festival! With an attendence of over 30,000 Dragon*Con is the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the universe! Maybe On Ensemble should write some songs in Quenya and try to perform at Dragon*Con. Or better yet Klingon… I bet Klingons play taiko.
We had a great performance at the Musical Instrument Museum tonight! We’ll be doing some more post performance posts but I just wanted to do a quick one to say thank you to the great staff at MIM! The food was great the museum was amazing and the theater was beautiful. We felt very well taken care of! I also wanted to give a shout out to the Fushicho Daiko and Odaiko Sonora members who helped us load out and took us out to post performance drinks! Taiko people rock!
Here’s a link to some photos from Paradise Lost : Shadows and Wings taken by Scott Barnett. These were taken at the main rehearsal before the Carnegie performance and you can kind of get the sense of the epic nature of it all!
We had our last performance of our New York trip today. Maz, Kaoru and I performed a short set at the Saint Marks Taiko Festival. Yesterday we had a great performance at DROM with Kaoru, Yuka Yamamoto, Shanir Blumenkranz, and Barbara Merjan. Yuka and Shanir started the show off with a great couple of songs featuring Yuka’s beautiful and playful voice and instrumental touches backed by Shanir’s great bass playing. Kaoru joined them for a song then the Barbara, Maz and myself joined in and provided a fun groove for their last piece. (more…)
I spent a large part of the day wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My strongest memory of the last time I visited the Met was being completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume and variety of the art displayed. Complete sensory and intellectual stimulation overload. So this time I had a different strategy. I didn’t worry about seeing everything in the museum. My plan was to just wander around lost until I came to something that caught my attention and then spend some time with that piece and see what happened. (more…)
Wow now I can say I performed at Carnegie Hall and I wouldn’t even be lying. The concert version of Eric Whitacre’s Paradise Lost : Shadows and Wings was quite an event. The choir was massive, the beats were massive, the soloist were amazing and much fun was had.
Yesterday I taught a workshop to Kaoru’s taiko center and we rehearsed for our upcoming gig at DROM. I’m planning on spending the next couple of days seeing as much music and eating as much good food as I can. Kaoru and his wife Mari have also got me hooked on Lost. Though they are at the end of season 5 and I can’t really imagine anything being more confusing than starting to watch this show from this point. I spend every episode confused beyond imagination but find the whole experience oddly compelling.