Fujirockers: The official fansite of the Fuji Rock Festival

Boys Noize, real name Alex Ridha, has been at Fuji Rock before, the last time in 2010, and the verdict on that set was pretty unanimous: crazy good. This time for his Saturday post-midnight set in the Red Marquee, the word “Live” appears in parenthesis next to his name, implying a live set. With DJs, a phrase like “live set” could mean a lot of things, so what does it mean here? Earlier this year at Coachella, there was a Boys Noize “live set”, and that meant Ridha teaming up with Skrillex (OMG! ~ and I am only being semi-ironic), but that was billed under the name of the new Skrillex-Boys Noize DJ super group, Dog Blood, and not as a Boys Noize (Live) set, as per the current FRF schedule. Now, Skrillex is playing Fuji Rock on Friday night, and this is so damn tempting to think about. BUT, there is no mention of Dog Blood on the schedule, and Skrillex is booked on Saturday night in Korea. So as tantalizing as this team-up sounds, and I for one am not so secretly rooting for it, we may have to go with the explanation that Boys Noize has given for his “live set”:
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If Bad Brains and Faith No More got together to play headbanging dubstep, it might come out something like Death Grips. The trio is the kind of group that reaffirms your belief that somewhere out there is a real underground scene, and it is generating a sound that is so strange and awesome you can only listen, submit and say, “Fuckin goddam right!” Bearded African-American frontman MC Ride, aka Stefan Burnett, woofs out caustic raps and sways to drawn-out dubstep basslines like he is reeling in slow motion from explosion shock waves. The rest of the art-noise-dance music comes from drummer Zach Hill and keyboardist/electronics guy Andy Morin. This kind of extreme eclecticism is more plausible as a product of Northern Cal, specifically Sacramento. For its sheer radicality, it brings to mind Boots Riley and The Coup, but instead of radical politics, this is about radical, paradigm-shattering music. Should you dance to it, mosh to it, or go full metal jacket? Probably all of the above. In interviews, Death Grips describe their music as simply “accelerated….” (long pause, as if there is nothing more to say) and aver a pure, we-don’t-even-think-about-this-shit kind of indie ethos — “It is better to have no representation than misrepresentation,” (see this interview by Adult Swim or this one on Pitchfork where they talk about trying to ditch a contract with a major label) — it is impossible to stay underground for long these days. Though the band only formed in 2010, the viral strength of their 2011 mixtape Exmilitary had Bjork commissioning remixes within a year and Pitchfork naming a follow-up release, The Money Store, one of the 10 best albums of 2012. And what greater cred could a band have for being authentically underground these days than a museum commission, in this case a collaboration with a video artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles?

But enough…I can’t even write about these guys without surfing from one low-budget YouTube video straight to the next, because the music is so damn good. Last year in the US, from Coachella to SXSW, Death Grips was on everyone’s tongues (or rather, blog top-10 lists) as a “Dude! You have really gotta see this band live!” kind of entity. No, they will not be for Belle and Sebastian fans, but if your curiosity is in the least piqued, watch the clips after the break, and stream the entire Exmilitary mixtape from YouTube. And get ready Fuji Rock for ….wob… wob… wob… GUILLOTINE!!!!!!

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It was hard tearing myself away from the Indian comedy circus next door, but for Rookie-a-Go-Go contender Deepnow, it was worth it. The band was three young dudes with mop haircuts, and at its best points, the music reminded me of Te’, because it was following the same good trend: pushing postrock back out of shoe-gaze and into performance-oriented music. The grooves were fun and heavy, and though some were still a bit predictable, the band was not afraid of noisy uptempo jams, at times dropping into Ruins-like exploding bass lines. They definitely finished with a bang. Rookie-a-Go-Go is a tough stage, crowd-wise. Most of the onlookers were actually in line for a neighboring noodle stall, but it was enough for a crowd, and most of the people were well intrigued.

Dancy anything music is the Crystal Palace’s specialty, so for Sunday night 1am slot at Fuji Rock 2012 they invited Ogawa Yusuke, a Tokyo DJ and bandleader who for this occasion brought a seven-piece band that was horn heavy. In short, it’s jazz you can dance to. They started out with a raucous version of “Tequila” but really, they were not nearly that trite. The tunes covered everything, polka, latin, rhumba and the lot. They had at least 600 arms swaying at one point (the Crystal Palace capacity is 300), and there were horn battles a plenty: sax versus trumpet, and the trombone player was swinging his axe in circles like he was a heavy metal headbanger. The crowd’s reaction? Please give me more – or at least that’s what they seemed to be saying with their feet. This was a sold-out Sunday at Fuji Rock and nobody wanted to go home, at least not this early. It was only just past midnight.

PHOTO: 八尾武志
More photos: http://fujirockexpress.net/12/16329.html

The emperor of Japanese folk rock hasn’t played Fuji Rock since 2002, so in the interim he asked his friend, another famed pop singer of his generation, the foppish Kiyoshiro Imawano, what he should play. Kiyoshiro, who played Fuji Rock in 2008 and passed within the next year, gave him a simple dictum: Play the hits. So that’s what Yosui Inoue did for this massive late afternoon set at Fuji Rock’s biggest stage on Sunday, July 29. His set for an audience of 20,000 or more included a couple songs off his most famous album, Kori no Sekaii (World of Ice)(1973), the first album to sell over a million copies in Japan, and a whole reel of other hits. “Kaerenai Futar”, “Kori no Sekai”, “Nazeka Shanghai” (Why Shanghai), and “Shonen Shidai” (The Time of Youth) were all delivered to an incredibly appreciative audience under a late day blue sky that was full of dragonflies. Yosui is now 64, but he is going strong and his voice is full as ever. He is known as one of Japan’s first independent singer to break through to pop magnitude, and he’s also a bit of a counter-culture figure who was once busted for marijuana and whose love ballads are laced with social commentary. (See Phil’s great introduction here.) That was all in the distant past for this set, but was certainly bubbling below the surface. If Inoue had fallen into irrelevance, he could not have possibly received the warm reception he did. A day earlier, British songwriter legend Ray Davies played the Green Stage to considerable applause. But imagine Davies playing Glastonbury, his home turf. That’s what Inoue was doing here, and a huge Fuji Rock crowd couldn’t have been happier to see it.

PHOTO: 直田亨
More photos: http://fujirockexpress.net/12/14633.html

When Refused’s lead singer Dennis Lyxzén told the Fuji Rock audience, “I’m sorry it took us 20 years to get here,” he was both referring to the band’s total absence from the music world in the last decade and also their sudden, much heralded return to a position that they might never have even imagined possible. Sunday night at Fuji Rock, the hardcore punk band from the tiny northern Sweden city of Umea, played to a White Stage audience of several thousands, with the entire front of the stage exploded into one giant mosh pit. They’ve done the same earlier this year at Coachella and several other major festivals. In the 90s, they were playing small punk clubs when they finally decided to call it quits.

Earlier in the night, Lyxzén offered a bit of an explanation, saying, “We wrote all these songs when we were a bunch of anarchists in the 90s, but they mean as much today as they did then, maybe even more. The world is even more fucked up in 2012 than it was then, and we need a revolution now more than ever.”

As for the set they played, it was as tight as a studio performance and as explosive as a club show. In other words, it was fucking awesome. Continue Reading…

Did anyone else think it was weird that on the weekend of the Olympics opening ceremony, some of the most famous names in British music were at Fuji Rock? Radiohead, Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher (both formerly of Oasis) and the Stone Roses were the Fuji Rock headliners, and save the Stone Roses, all of them were part of the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony soundtrack (see The Telegraph for the full list). Ray Davies of the Kinks played “All of the Day and All of the Night” here at the festival (twice, actually), while they played the song from a recording in London. The same goes for “Rudy” by the Specials. The Clash are no longer around to play “London Calling”, but their touring DJ, Scratchy, played it here at the Palace of Wonder. Then there were well over a dozen artists who’ve appeared in the past few years at Fuji Rock and were also part of the olympic soundtrack, though they didn’t play live: The Chemical Brothers, Franz Ferdinand, New Order, Underworld, Dizzee Rascal, Muse, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs… and possibly a few more. To its credit though, the Olympics did have Paul McCartney. Still, if you want to make it a contest on who had the most and best British music this weekend…. well, I daren’t say it, but a lot of us here Naeba are sure happy with the results.

Through band leader and keyboardist Ivan Neville and guitarist Ian Neville – they’re cousins – Dumstaphunk draws its lineage as a New Orleans funk outfit back to the Meters and the Neville Brothers, the bands of their fathers, Aaron and Art. So everybody knew they were coming to get funky, and with two bass players onstage (Nick Daniels and Tony Hall), this was all pretty obvious from the outset. Also as expected, musicianship was at a premium. The sound was classic funk, the double slap basses and vocal harmonies recalling the sound of Truth and Soul era Fishbone, and Ivan Neville’s organ evoking a bit of Parliament. Indeed, the music was great, with the caveat that the songbook was not always equal to their phenomenal skills. The first several opening tunes simply established a simple funky musical theme, then jammed around it, but never managed to go up a level. One of the best songs was in fact a cover, David Bowie’s “Fame”, and they pulled it off phenomenally. From there, things picked up. They closed with a few very strong tunes and some great drum work from Nikki Glaspie. Though it was hardly pushing the envelope, it was real, authentic funk, and it was played to perfection.

Dumpstaphunk plays again in Tokyo tomorrow, Monday, July 30, 7pm @ Club Quattro. Stanton Moore of Galactic will be opening.

PHOTO: 加藤智恵子
More photos: http://fujirockexpress.net/12/15116.html

Only a few mosh pits happen at Fuji Rock each year. The number tends to be pretty minimal, especially on the main stages. The organizers seem to like it that way. But today is the day when it happens, and for FUCKED UP’s afternoon set at the White Stage, the punkers were ready and waiting. It was awesome, and it’s also a prelude to something even better. When the REFUSED go on in about 40 minutes (at 7pm), the shit is gonna go crazy. Just wait till Dennis Lynxen belts out, “Can I scream!!!!” That will be the detonator. I’ll ya’ll on the other side of the explosion.

The last time Denki Groove – Japan’s most popular DJ team – played Fuji Rock in 2006, it was in front of 15,000 or 20,000 people on the Green Stage. So giving them the Red Marquee, a semi-indoor venue that holds less than a third that on a sold-out Saturday at midnight, might have been a bit of a miscalculation. Beyond the should-to-should sardine pack under the roof, the crowd at the back of the Red Marquee was at least an extra thousand, stretching all the way back into the woods. And the side entrance was almost impenetrable. For those inside, however, there was an exercise in mass happiness going on, or perhaps more precisely, mass Denki-ness. Continue Reading…

Somehow, I didn’t expect Busy P to play a set of mostly house music, and a bit retro at that. But retro? Of course, he’s French. I also didn’t expect him to have a 1.5-meter-long inflatable Air France jet on the DJ booth. So much for preconceptions I guess.

For Busy P, a.k.a. Pedro Winter, this was his Fuji Rock debut, and a pretty big night for his label Ed Banger Records to boot. Justice, you see, had just headlined the White Stage a few hours earlier. Winter’s first big claim to fame was as a manager for Daft Punk a little over a decade ago, and from there he went on to start Ed Banger Records, which introduced the world to Justice and for the past decade has pioneered the way in to electro, electro-house and all other variants, or in other words, the option to produce dance music while coming from a background of punk, metal and rock. Like the much more pop-oriented David Guetta, Winter has shoulder-length blond hair, has scruff on his cheeks, and goes in for a rocker-styled Curt Cobain look that distinguishes him from most DJs from the US, UK and the rest of continental Europe. Continue Reading…

Just to keep you straight, the top-hatters are from Shanghai, and the Vikings are from Hong Kong. To stick out in the massive 40,000-a-day crowds, a couple groups of visiting expats are using costumes. The mad-hatters, a group of four expats from Shanghai wearing pink, red, lime green and baby blue for example, weren’t convinced that averaging 187cm in height would mean they could find each other in the crowd. So they went to the Shanghai fabric market and had extremely cheap circus empresario suits made. The Vikings are meanwhile all from Hong Kong and using similar logic. It’s their second year. Not only do they say it works, they also say their moms’ think it’s cool.

In the daytime, the Red Marquee is usually an international showcase for up-and-comers, so it was nice to see a Japanese band playing a prime mid-afternoon slot. Unfortunately, it was also unbearably hot under the roof, but a raucous crowd seemed happy even with sweat soaking through their shirts. They were there to see Acidman, a power trio now in their 13th year, and from the first song (and every song after that), they were screaming “Hey Hey Hey” (or clapping in time, or doing whatever singalong part was called for) until the very end.

Acidman’s sound draws from punk, hardcore and indie rock, but it always steers things back towards Japanese pop, especially in terms of catchy melodies, smooth vocals and general listenability. It’s sort of like how the Red Hot Chili Peppers turned the hard-edged sounds of punk and hard funk to a mass radio audience, only they did it for a Japanese public and by invoking local pop conventions. While they still crank the music pretty hard, they’re much more listener friendly than Japanese hardcore bands like the Garlic Boys or perhaps even Brahman. To my mind, they’re also a bit less interesting and unique. But at the same time, if they can inspire 3,000 fans to fist-pump their way through a 45-minute set in a sauna, how could I deny them proper respect?

Lynval Golding of the Specials, doing a ska DJ set from 4-5am, at Fuji Rock’s most fun most intimate venue, are you friggin kidding me? It could not be missed. And if you did miss it you should be sorry. It was incredibly, skankingly, foot-stompingly fun. At times, it was like living history with narration. Lynval went from Prince Buster’s “Al Capone” into the Specials’ “Maggies Farm”, showing you where the riff had come from and how it had traveled. All he had to do, was take the microphone and say, “This is one of our earliest singles, a song from 1979.” So yes, he played the tunes: ska, dancehall, rocksteady, even Amy Winehouse. But mostly he just had fun, frequently stepping to the front of the stage to slap five with his fans, and sometimes even jumping down onto the dance floor to pose for photos or whine and grind with his young fans. This was the kind of guest DJ set you imagine you’d want to play if you were a 61-year-old ska legend. A beer in hand, a smile on your face and a bunch of pretty young things just beaming happiness and dancing like there was no tomorrow. But Lynval knows all too well that there is no such thing as “no tomorrow”. Especially when you’re having fun, tomorrow tends to come far too quickly, so sign-off tune was perhaps a reminder, and also a celebration. It was certainly the perfect tune to play at 5am with the sun coming up outside the venue. It was “Enjoy Yourself,” the Specials at their very best:

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as you wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

More photos after the break. Continue Reading…

If Palace of Wonder is Fuji Rock’s intimate performance venue of the night, Cafe de Paris is its daytime counterpart. Four acts are each playing one show a day, and they are all cabaret acts with a bit of sizzle. It’s perfect both for a bit of daytime decadence, and also getting very close to some excellent music.

Zaza Fournier is a pretty girl with a big accordion, a flower skirt and an utterly captivating everything. She looks effortlessly sexy just flipping her hair out of her eyes, and once she begins to sing, the whole crowd is, as they say in France, wrapped around her little finger. The music is a mix of classic chanson and French rock ‘n roll, more Marie Laforet than Edith Piaf, with a bit of Jane Birkin-like breathy emotions thrown in to keep you panting. She’s accompanied on electric guitar by Nicolas Bogue, who looks and plays like he’s straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, perhaps the one he hasn’t made yet – just imagine Tarantino’s homage to French new wave cinema, and Zaza Fournier and Nicolas Bogue will be on stage somewhere, like the 5, 6, 7, 8s in Kill Bill. Continue Reading…

The simplest reason to love the Crystal Palace Tent is that it subscribes to a simple formula: amplified acoustic dance music + wooden floor = people dancing their asses off all night long. Many of the bands who play here will also play the Orange Court, where they’ll be presented more formally as jazz or world music to a crowd that’s far more polite. But in the Crystal Palace, all music is treated as living music, or in other words, music to dance to.

The band that kicked it off this year was a group put together by Réunion islander Lindigo, the frontman of an eight-piece group of percusionists and dancers. Réunion is a small French-speaking island off the coast of Madagascar with an extremely diverse population mixing Africans, Indians, Europeans, Chinese and several other groups. As Lindigo told us from the stage, “My island is mixed people!” His music and band is a rhythmic force of nature. Of the eight players on stage, Lindigo, a man with a golden smile and joyous voice, was the only one not banging on something. And they banged on a lot of things: a thick log of bamboo, a folded piece of tin mounted on a drum stand, all manner of hand drums, a djembe, a xylophone of bamboo slats with gourds underneath to amplify the vibrations, and a couple more conventional things like a snare drum and a couple cymbals. There was also a sort of plucked lute and a little six-string electric guitar that looked homemade from a wooden box. Continue Reading…

Given that this is essentially a Britrock weekend, the Kooks could have possibly played a larger stage than the Red Marquee, which was fairly overflowing with fans, many of whom probably also had a keen interest in seeing the Stone Roses, Beady Eye, Radiohead, and Noel Gallagher. Not that this band from Brighton didn’t have its own following. When you put it all together, you had a monster feel for the Kooks indoor set late Friday afternoon, which lasted over an hour (longer than the Beady Eye set which followed immediately at the Green Stage, just a 5-minute walk away).

Frontman Luke Pritchard fairly sensed the heady vibe, and let the crowd-pleasers flow, announcing tunes with lead-ins like, “We’re going to play one of our first singles. I think you’ll know this one. So let’s get the whole place going, all the way to the back.” The song was “Ooh La”, and it did get a rise. So did a lot of their other hits. This came about 40-minutes into the set, and it justified my patience with their set, because up till then, I might as well have been watching a band on TV. From “Ooh La” however, things got really good. Continue Reading…

It was hard watching Liam Gallagher and Beady Eye perform on Friday, July 27, the opening night of Fuji Rock 2012, without thinking of the drama that must be involved with his playing today, and his brother – Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds – playing tomorrow. All the artists at Fuji Rock stay in only one hotel in Naeba, the Prince Hotel. The Prince is pretty gigantic, but will Liam stay in one end and Noel in the other? Will Liam leave Naeba tonight, to eliminate any awkward encounters in the lobby? What must he be feeling to essentially be the opening band for the Stone Roses tonight, while Noel gets to be the Saturday headliner? Their breakup three years ago – which was also the breakup of Oasis – was hardly painless. Looking at recent set lists, they seem to have somehow contrived a way to carve up the Oasis songbook, so that Beady Eye gets some songs (only a couple) and High Flying Birds the rest. (As co-blogger Phil reminded me earlier today, Noel seems to be fine with this, as long as Liam keeps filling out the copyright forms.) So even before Liam and the other five members of Beady Eye took the stage on Friday, these questions were certainly in the minds of many. And judging by the golf claps, meek cheers and lack of an encore on Friday night, Noel may get the better of the Gallagher brothers’ rivalry this weekend. Continue Reading…

The Union Jack will be flying proudly this weekend all around Fuji Rock, especially at the Green Stage. We should hardly be surprised, as this is the biggest power lineup of Britrock bands Fuji Rock has ever had, and possibly the most awesome collection of Britrock ever in the Eastern hemisphere: The Stone Roses, Liam Gallagher one day and Noel the next, and finally Radiohead, plus the Kooks, Ed Sheeran and several others scattered throughout the schedule. So wave those flags proudly. As far as Japan goes, this is your weekend.

If Coldplay suddenly decided to become a nu-metal band, they might sound something like Twenty One Pilots, and as weird as that sounds, it’s not a dis. This band is very young and very ready, and they’ve clearly got something going on. They have no record label, no albums, a huge pop sound, and live-show energy that is absolutely electrifying. From the first song, the entire Red Marquee alternated between bouncing to the beat and simply being mesmerized by this duo from Columbus, Ohio – Tyler Joseph on vocals and synthesizer and Josh Dunn on drums. As a singer, frontman and songwriter, Joseph has the voice and stage presence of a late-stage contestant on American Idol. His voice is absolutely booming and he’s got a fantastic way of strutting and embracing the audience, often with both hands in the air. Songs often begin softly, with Joseph sitting down playing his keyboard, but as the pace quickens and intensity builds, he begins to stand, and by the end, he’ll probably be at the front of the stage either singing his lungs out or rapping. Dunn is more than up to matching him on a pared down drum kit. The effect is that the tunes start off as Coldplay and end up as Rancid, except for the closer “Trees”, which also exploded into an insane 4-4 dance beat. It was like they’d just switched gears, genres and possibly even venues and were suddenly playing the club remix of the radio pop song they’d started out with. By the time that happened, Joseph and Dunn had brought a collection of drums (mostly the toms) to the front of the stage and were both banging away with abandon. Much of the music was pretty obviously piped in, including some of the vocal parts, but the crowd didn’t seem to care much. The scene was simply frantic. Which is not to say I didn’t have a few reservations. Twenty One Pilots are not always in musical territory that I find particularly interesting, but still, what they do, they do incredibly well, and it was enough to win me over. All told, this was a fantastic Fuji Rock debut. One imagines that these guys will be back.

PHOTO: 平川　けいこ
More photos: http://fujirockexpress.net/12/10665.html

Fuji Rock has a tradition of having loud, high-energy bands open stages at 10 or 11am. I like to call this the punk rock alarm clock. So Friday morning at 11:30am, the first band to play the Red Marquee in 2012 was veteran Japanese punkers Cobra, a band that originally formed in 1982 on the model of British Oi punk bands. They’ve broken up and gotten back together a few times since, and have an interesting status as a four-piece with nine former members. They are currently in the midst of one of their reunion tours and trying somewhat unsuccessfully not to look like a bunch of middle-aged punkers. Frontman Yosu-ko had a short buzz cut, and guitarist Lina had bright green hair. The drums and crunching power chords were still full of energy and driving the show, and the vocals punched in with lots of Go! Go! Go!, Hey! Hey! Hey! and Fight! Fight! Fight! It was a fun sing along, and there were plenty of fists in the air, but maybe it was too darn hot or too darn early, so there was no mosh pit. Cobra’s faithful fans gave a few hearty cheers and enjoyed the show, and then it was all over and they went out and on to the rest of Fuji Rock 2012.

PHOTOS: 平川　けいこ
more photos: http://219.87.83.4/News/feat/archives/2012/07/25/2003538566

If you’re one of those nocturnal Fuji Rockers who looks forward mainly to a nightly debouch at the Palace of Wonder, there is a certain question of what to do in the daytime? Well, wonder no more. The Cafe de Paris has a pole-dancing troupe, “Polish”, that’s giving at least three shows a day, one show after each musical performance. The girls are Akane, Tomo and Kaori, and if you’re up for it, they will happily snatch a 1000 yen note out of your mouth with their lips, or let you strategically insert the money into the elastic parts of their rather bikini-esque costumes. But perhaps the best thing about this pole-dancing shows is that they solve certain schedule problems. Now you can begin each day by hanging out in a dark cabaret, sipping mojitos and watching the girls do their thing. In the evening, take in a headliner so you can go on about what a bunch of whingers and tossers they are later on… at the Palace of Wonder, where you will naturally round out the evening sometime around dawn. But that should be obvious, as obvious as what this report really needs is more photos. Meet the girls after the break. Continue Reading…

Every year Fuji Rock has a band that will play as many gigs as they can find stages to play on and audiences to play for. For a huge festival like this, where contracts with headliners cover every last detail, photography is controlled on main stages and most bands need a little “extra sumpthin sumpthin” for any extra request, we’ve really come to love the musicians that just want to play.

This year, that band is Argentina’s Onda Vaga. On Thursday afternoon, they were already serenading young ladies in the campsite, and promising at least eight or nine shows by the time Fuji Rock winds up early next Monday morning. Was this their first gig? We’re not quite counting it as such, since it was just two or three songs a cappella with a small four-string guitar (or was it an oversized ukelele?) But they will play the opening night party in the Red Marquee at 9:50pm, and they hinted at an “illegal campsite gig” once all the official fun stops tonight.

The band says they just came off a month of touring in France and Spain, and are totally psyched to be in Japan for the first time ever. After Fuji Rock, they’ll stick around Tokyo and environs for a week, and then back to Argentina to take a breather. So keep an eye out. This is Onda Vaga.

In recent years, music legends have become an ever more important component of Fuji Rock. The festival may have been built around top acts of the day like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bjork and the Chemical Brothers, but this year there will also be at least eight headlining musicians over the age of 60. The festival has always had retro moments, but in the last two years – perhaps made apparent by the jaw-dropping return of 70s rock icon John Fogerty – the historical programming has seemed ever more pronounced.

This year, the oldest musician is 80-year-old Jamaican ska pioneer Ernest Ranglin, who played with Prince Buster, the Skatalites, Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley and helped invent the “scratching” sound of ska guitar. Buddy Guy, 76, is an American blues guitarist who helped define the sound of Chicago blues (read preview). The Kinks stopped playing in 1996, but lead singer Ray Davies (actually, since he’s been knighted, it’s “Sir” Ray Davies) continues to write new material even as he performs Kinks classics, as he did at Glastonbury 2010, when he played Lola, You Really Got Me, Sunny Afternoon, All of the Day and All of the Night as well as a few tunes of his post-1985 solo career (see the entire set list). Two icons of Japanese pop will play: Tokiko Kato is Japan’s Joan Baez (2011 review), and Yosui Inoue, who became a legend in the 1970s and has seven #1 albums in Japan.

Here is a quick list of headlining musicians and band leaders over 60 years old who will perform this year.

Ernest Ranglin, Jamaican ska musician, b. 1932
Buddy Guy, American blues musician, b. 1936
Elvin Bishop, American blues guitarist, b. 1942
Tokiko Kato, Japanese singer, b. 1943
Ray Davies, the Kinks, lead singer, b. 1944
Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, Toots and the Maytals, b. 1945
Yōsui Inoue, Japanese pop singer, b. 1948
Lynval Golding, the Specials, guitar and vocals, b. 1951
Continue Reading…

YOUTUBE FAMOUS: ARAABMUZIK MAKING LIVE BEATS ON HIS MPC.

For a 23-year-old, Araabmuzik is sure surrounded by a fuckload of nu-style music buzz. He’s a darling of Vice TV, is a featured “creator” on the Creators Project, and last year his debut album Electronic Dream got a rave review from Pitchfork, with the rest of the Internet hipster-verse hopping on the bandwagon. In live shows, he got serious hype from playing Coachella earlier this year, and in the 23 days left before Fuji Rock, he’s playing five other international music festivals, including Pitchfork in Chicago, Roskilde in Denmark and the Wireless Festival in London. The day after his Friday, July 27 FRF set as part of the after-midnight Planet Groove lineup in the Red Marquee, he’s scheduled to play in New York City. In the last year in the studio, he produced the beats for 50 Cent’s May 2012 single “Murder One”, did music for an Adidas commercial featuring Derrick Rose, and now is set to feature in another commercial alongside NFL quarterback Cam Newton. There is also an album project with A$AP Rocky that was well hyped but now seems to have stalled. He recently told Vice TV, “I don’t know man. I don’t think it’s coming out anymore.”

Araabmuzik is Abraham Orellana from Providence, Rhode Island. His music is American-style dubstep, with a lot of crossover into hip hop. Much of his fame has been built on YouTube videos, for the way he creates all of his beats live on a machine called an MPC Player. Yes, you read that right. He makes his beats LIVE. And not just some of them. ALL OF THEM. Here’s how he does it. Continue Reading…