May 26, 2009
University of Pittsburgh Gamelan at the Columbus Asian Festival
This past weekend, I played with Pitt’s University Gamelan at the Columbus Asian Festival. It was a fun experience; we got put up in a hotel, there were a bunch of cool performances to see (including a few taiko performances by some local school groups), and as is always the case at such festivals, lots of good food.
I have uploaded pictures of our performance to my web gallery. Click on the picture below to check them out!
May 14, 2009
On JPop
Since there are still a few weeks until my travels start, I realized that I need some ways to fill this place until then. I could do the regular ol’ stream-of-thought blog posting (which’ll probably come at some point), but for today at least I thought I’d spend time introducing you the reader to various parts of my psyche. In an effort to have you get to know a little bit about me (otherwise, why do you care what I’m blogging, right?), I figured I’d talk about various likes/dislikes of mine.
Today, I’m going to discuss some of my favorite Japanese pop music acts. How much this really tells you something about me, I dunno. There’s probably a connection between the type of music one listens and the person themselves, but I’m not going to think about that – you can judge for yourself. Also, it’ll be a bit of an introduction to Japanese popular music, for those of you who might not know much about it. I have some eclectic tastes, I’ve discovered.
This’ll be a multimedia experience of sorts. Along with my brief musings, I’m also going to post a YouTube video for each artist. Lately, I rarely listen to the radio – YouTube is how I tend to find out about new artists (apart from recommendations from friends and family, of course). So, I’m going to pass on the experience to you.
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The Road Goes Ever On and On... 