According to my mother, my old man really loved music. My mother continues to look out for Fujio-kun (as we call him at the house) and they still keep in touch. Years before I was born my father lived in Kyoto for a time, playing with Fujio Yamaguchi in a band that later became known as Murahachibu, but he later ended up moving back to Tokyo. For the most part I did like what my parents listened to, but to this day I still don’t care much for Janis Joplin or Aretha Franklin. The sounds you could often hear at our house included those of Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles, Bob Marley and Earth, Wind & Fire, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Fujio Yamaguchi. My old man was constantly playing the guitar when he was home. There had been complaints from other tenants of the building, but the main reason for its closing was that it began to get less customers after a major company opened their rehearsal studio in Kichijoji. Soon after my little sister was born, he could no longer provide for our household with just the studio and he had to close it down. He always brought the customers coffee - a sign of the times, perhaps.Īs to the type of business he was running there, I guess it wouldn’t be too far off to call it “managerial” in nature. I say “ studio,” but what it really was was just a room inside an apartment building. My father owned this small rehearsal studio near Tokyo when I was little. There aren’t many people like that out there.īy the time I started high school, I was constantly thinking about music. HMVįreshness of someone who does their own thing.Īnd that’s regardless of the maturity that’s It’s something on a whole new level altogether. The sounds on it show an exceedingly distinctive brilliance among the current music scene a kind of originality that - even looking back - is something only Lamp could’ve produced. Those lyrics are placed on top of a new sound, making for an 8-song masterpiece of the highest order. It’s something that needs to be called the “rebirth” of Lamp a condensation of tighter rhythm arrangements and even more of the characteristics that make up the “Lamp sound.” It features their usual brand of beautiful lyrics that capture places in time: the cold and the warmth of winter nostalgic sensations we’ve all once experienced a man and a woman in an imaginary place, in an imaginary town. Now, Lamp are releasing their long-awaited new album, Tokyo Utopia Tsuushin, recorded alongside the Hachigatsu no Shijou EP with about a year and half of work behind it. It showed us the world of Lamp richer than ever before, opening new possibilities for them as a band. Hachigatsu no Shijou, a limited edition EP released in mid-2010, had summer as its theme, and on it they once again portrayed the fleetingness of the seasons in its lyrics, along with sound imagery that made for a perfect companion to the words. With Lamp’s previous album, Lamp Gensou, they quite literally to its name gave us an album full of fleeting, illusional beauty a sound world drawing a line between music you’d normally expect to hear in this day and age an innovative masterpiece in modern pop music. You can buy Lamp’s music directly from the band, both physically and digitally, on Bandcamp. Lamp online: website, label, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, Instagram Original text: Taiyo Someya (parts one, two, three & four) In it, he details the early history of Lamp and their journey towards the release of what was at the time their latest album. Back in February 2011, Taiyo Someya wrote a four-part column for HMV ONLINE to commemorate the release of Tokyo Utopia Tsuushin.
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