It’s about time I finally talk about one of my top three bands – The Oral Cigarettes. I’m not sure anymore if they were one of my Spotify finds or if I found them through the anime Noragami, but either way – at this point I’ve listened to all their albums heaps of times, and they have an almost guaranteed spot on my monthly playlists.
Kyouran Hey Kids!! is probably the first song of theirs that I heard, has the most plays on Spotify, and simply is a really, really good song. The art plays with RGB and CMY colour schemes, using blending modes that digital art programmes provide. Funnily enough, the day after I started working on this piece, I got to experience this very effect in real life at the local underground station.
The angle is quite far from what I’d originally pictured, so I might redo this piece in the future. Sometimes things develop differently from what you had planned, and sometimes that’s good. But this time the end result doesn’t quite live up to my expectation, even though I do like the finished piece. It was important for me to go through with it, anyway; I don’t like unfinished pieces. It was a good proof of concept as for the lights, and I might just reuse the idea or actually redo this piece specifically when I feel like it.
I love the sound of Japanese in music, as it works really well with the way the language is built from syllables. Many, many years ago, I got five Japanese tracks from a friend, and I had those five tracks on repeat with little other music I really enjoyed. Those five tracks were the first four openings and the first ending of the BLEACH anime. Those five tracks probably influenced my music taste more than any radio ever could have, and I will have to dedicate a blog post to them some day. Still, to this day, they’re a clean representation of the music I love now. Japanese music shaped my taste in music from the very beginning of me caring about music, and I think it influenced why I care more about the instruments and sound of the voice than the lyrics. I care about lyrics, but they’ve always been a second factor to me, never the main focus.
So this piece has nothing to do with the lyrics, because I usually don’t bother looking up the lyrics of Japanese songs. Maybe it’s my equivalent to other people mindlessly singing flat, unimaginative or insulting lyrics – a thing I simply cannot do in German, my head is constantly annoyingly active and aware. But it doesn’t know Japanese, and sometimes I wonder if I should stop attempting to learn it in order to keep that little peace of ignorance.
jenyoyo 