Yawata Kyoto Cherry Blossom Grove and Walk

 

Sewaritei Yodogawa Riverside Park is the local place for the full cherry blossom viewing experience around here. Just one train stop away for me.  A 1.4km canopy of Cherry Blossoms and an equal length walk back past all the food stalls.

There was heavy rain early this morning and the forecast was for that to continue most of the day, but it fined up suddenly around 9AM, so today became an excellent day to go blossom viewing.

I actually went a week ago and saw that the trees were all still without any blooms. Very different a week later.

I was actually listening to Tangerine Dream Booster VI during my walk, and I think that adds to the proceedings tremendously Cuts out the chatter around you, of the many talkative Mandarin speaking tourists and you get a musical journey, depending on what you select to play.

X1 music player and JBL ENDURANCE RUN 2 earbuds. Good sound and fit. I use the over the top of the ear approach, so that if I unplug them, they are still just hanging at my ears, so I can talk to someone and soon put them back in, and they aren't dangling around my knees.

Tangerine Dream played concerts in Cathedrals and all kinds of atmospheric places. With headphones you can do the same with whatever music you like. I particularly like cafes, but NOT Starbucks!

This year there were two Kebab stalls, and I chatted with one Turkish guy. He drove the van from Osaka to be here. Bought two chicken kebabs from him and his Japanese lady assistant. He wanted to know where I was from as was quite friendly. Also bought a Beef kebab at a tent with two other Turkish guys in it. First time to see a BEEF Kebab offered here, usually just chicken. I now know the Turkish Kebab in Japan is rather different than the Lebanese Dona Kebabs they have in Sydney Australia. Here they are they are a simpler affair of chicken/beef, grated cabbage and a sauce that is a mix of Ketchup and Mayonnaise in a rolled flat bread. They were bigger this year, or maybe my memory is just bad. Then some Chicken Karage and extra long fried potato chips. Brought that home for lunch with wife and sister in law. Not cheap, 1000yen each, but tasty and a nice yearly treat at the moment.

The music in the video started out as all heavy rhythm guitar, but that got chopped right back and replaced by mostly synths when I put it against the picture. Added a fisheye lens effect as well as the 12fps frame rate.

So I wonder what I will do next. Musically something more Tangerine Dream-ish or more Freak Kitchen-ish?

I actually did do a 5 page comic related to the new ERA of Carstyling that is back from the dead. Maybe more in that direction.

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EVERYTHING IS JUST FINE, REALLLLLLLLY

Whereas, where I am in Japan here, things ARE REALLY good.  😀
 

Had several different goes at the cartoon used here yesterday, and versions of the music. The first few were inspired by my recent watching of  the Otomo episode of Manben neo, and had a Rainbow robot head, and the theme was rather different.

But with catching a glimpse of the "3rd term" news and other "not great" goings on in that far away Trumpistan, EVERYTHING IS JUST FINE, REALLLLLLLY as the vibrant life force drains, seemed more appropriate, and subtle.  

Works just as a vector poster too, I think. Used a variation with the waveform as the cover of the track on Bandcamp

And a related cartoon from a couple of days latter:

But yesterday, April 1st 2025, was a really good day for me. I won the lottery to be able to go to the Freak Kitchen Osaka Concert in September. Even booked a next door hotel to the venue, to not have to rush home the hour+ on a late train.  September is a long way away, and a lot can happen in that time though.

Still feeling really nostalgic about the Simmons SDS-V drum sounds used here. Will keep with them for a while more.  As I wrote before, I once built a small electronic drum kit and practiced with it, and it was really fun. I very briefly considered getting the Roland TD02K to play it with

but I came to realize, I don't care to learn the drums now at 66, and these things still make too much noise for the environment I am in.  Roland do have a really silent kit, the VQD106, that would work, but that is way more expensive.  Akai MPD218 finger drumming is the way to go for sure for me.

I can't say I am getting better at under 60 second compositions, but I am trying to make something interesting to me.  Most of what I do is power chords with a few mono parts on top, like bass, synth and guitar melody.  Mostly working with 8 bar sections.  Here, that became an  intro, 16 bar section, 8 bar section and ending.  Sometimes I repeat the same melody fragment, but not here.  A lot of the time feel I am just making variations of the same thing, and that is kind of true, even if the results are different. Just doing it for myself, searching for "it". A track I will play happily on repeat for days on end, until I do the next one.  

The Otomo episode of Manben neo also got me to search out Domu, which the episode covered and his Fire-Ball, which is in THE COMPLETE WORKS 5.

It was interesting to see that Urasawa Naoki considers Tezuka and Otomo to be the most influential mangaka to him.  Usually Mizuki Shigeru is in there too.  

I will now go off and ponder what I will do next.  

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Retirement & The Bucket List

That list of things you want to do, The Bucket List.  

Like making my own comics:

I have now done most of the things I ever set out to do. Be involved with some technological worthwhile product, live and work overseas, make music, draw, sculpt, start my own (side) business, have a family and a few other things.

There are also a lot of things I never had any interest in, like Being Rich and Famous, performing on stage, a Tennis Pro or Golfer, so they haven't happened and I am very okay with that too.

Even have a Best Of Album on Bandcamp. But that wasn't something that was ever on my Bucket List. My desire was just to do music production, in my own studio, at a level I was happy with. The album came out of that.  

Retirement itself was never on my bucket list.  Retirement wasn't something I ever thought about till just weeks before I did it.  And that I would retire to Japan wasn't either.  But giving up full time work had such a huge impact on my life. A huge stress was removed from me.  Hadn't seen that coming.

Gave me an opportunity to really think about what I like and don't like and what comes natural to me, and is comfortable.  I have come to embrace my true Introvert self, and be content.  Making something in my small studio is bliss. It is also something that doesn't really cost anything.

During my working life, I travelled overseas a lot. Catching an airplane somewhere now is not what I want to do. But I do love going somewhere up to a couple hours away by train, and Japan really is a place to do that in comfort.

Retirement has been a chance to wake up and think, "what do I want to do today?". Sometimes that is just hangout with our cat, at other times build and paint a model, go to an Art Exhibition, go to a Cafe and Drink Coffee while listening to my music player, or play with a synthesizer.  

There are lots of things happening around the world that I can get really upset about, but I also have no agency over any of them. Nothing I can do has any impact over them at all, even if I have drawn a cartoon or two pointing out some of the stupidity.  Generally I have found there is no good side to even thinking about them. It saves my mental health to not follow what is happening and pretty much ignore the foreign news. That keeps me a happy camper.  

Hope you get the opportunity to be able to do what makes you content.

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Concert Ticket Lotteries

 

First time to experience the e-plus ticket lottery system, in my attempt to get to the Freak Kitchen Osaka concert, with opening act 六合 / Rikugo .

But unlike a Lottery, you don't pay anything unless you actually get drawn to buy a ticket.

A musical ditty threw together this afternoon. REAPER DAW, Simmons SDS-V drum vst, 8 string guitar and VITAL for bass and additional u-he synth melodic/siren thing...

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Sanjo II 3000 Kyoto Japan

 

Not an Ambient Piece. 

A throw away 1:40 thing from this morning, recycled this evening 😀. But with JP8 rather than Church Organ, and 16th note sequencer bass synth. Repeating 8 bar A Lydian parts for JP8 and bass.  Threw in a Black Metal drummer, over playing a Simmons SDS-V 😮, to keep the Ibanez GRG7221QA-TBB 7 String guitar thru a Line 6 UBER METAL pedal company.

Spent all of 5 minutes with GROK and prompts around "Sanjo Kyoto Year 3000".  Hope it is never built up like this, and anything new needs the taste of a Syd Mead if they do.

Put together in MOHO PRO12 Animation system as it really fast and simple to do this, and way easier than my Video editor Vegas Movie Studio.

This uses the same sounds as the other things I have done in the last 2 weeks since getting the Simmons SDS-V vst Electronic Drums sim.  Love the metal guitar tone too.

Part of me feels there should be a blistering guitar solo with pick scrape, sweep picking and two handed taping of some interesting arpeggios,  but I really like a simple riff or melody to hum.  No one hums a blistering guitar solo with a zillion random notes in it.  

I would normally just put an image of the audio waveform in a video like this, but had the random idea to use AI future Sanjo Kyoto instead.  It takes less effort than preparing the audio waveform!

AI has so many problems. In this case, I have no idea where the training data for these city images came from, but do know you can't copyright them.  In this case, it would have taken me weeks to paint images similar to these, and so I wouldn't have done it. In Grok it was all of 5 minutes, which is fine for a disposable little video 10 people will ever watch.. Would have done a manga like scene instead, as the ROI to do it isn't worth it. 

The music is the main thing here, but I didn't really take any time to do that in this case either. There is nothing stereotypically "Japan" about the music at all.  BIGBOSS KYOTO   is at Sanjo Kyoto which has a nice collection of very metal guitars, so I don't see this as out of place at all.

Also recently learnt about Rikugo 六合 a Kyoto Prog Metal "Dark Rock" band, and have been listening to their material the last few days. They are the support band for the September Freak Kitchen Japan Tour.  Girl Punk band Otoboke Beaver おとぼけビ～バ～ are also Kyoto natives.

So to me, heavy/ metal music is very much a part of Kyoto.

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