Blog - HOSAKA Akane sings story books: report
Hosaka Akane sings story books: report
Last Sunday (August 30) at Enban was an event featuring Hosaka Akane. Weather wasn't so bad until late afternoon when it started raining quite a lot. In Koenji was also being held the annual dance matsuri Awa-odori, and it was part of our plan to look around while heading to Enban, maybe eating bits from street stands, but instead we had to look around for a restaurant that wasn't full. We made it a little bit later than expected to Enban, missing about two acts, but we were still in time for Akane's performance.
This time Akane didn't do a usual set with her iBook and playing her regular songs. Instead she had picked a series of 4 children's story books that she liked since she was little, and played original songs while singing the stories into a voice changer. There was no backtrack used, she instead used a beatbox and looped several layers of keyboard melodies to play the song live all by herself. That was really amazing!
The stories were a series by Sena Keiko, titled "ninjin" ("Carrots"), "iya da iya da" ("No! No!"), "nenai ko wa dare da" ("Who's the child up at night") and "mojamoja" ("Shaggy"?), in the order she performed them. Each story was quite cute, she said "nenai ko..." really scared her when she was little. Her usual accomplice DJ Peaky was assisting by turning the story book pages under a camera that projected on the large screen.
The songs weren't half-cooked either, and I really wish she will record and release them in some way.
Playing before Akane was, I think, Moscow chikuonki, two girls wearing pink wig-ish things. Most of their songs just sounded experimental to me, but the last upbeat song they played impressed me as both showed they could play their instruments rather well.
When we thought the event had ended, there was another short performance by stage actress Miyake Yasuko, who acted a Kansai school teacher trying to get her students to read Shakespeare in a Tokyo accent, that was funny!
Larger sizes and more photos at Flickr
Posted on September 6, 2009 at 12:02 | Tweet
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That sounds like a fun show. Would have loved to see Akane's set!
Posted by Jack on September 11, 2009 at 03:08