Sliced Yams / ヤムライ

I call it ‘The Yamurai’.

It’s the Christmas season! What does that have to do with a late-night Yam-off? No idea.

Objects in the Mirror

… are closer than they appear. This one’s for A.M., the only ‘up’ one in her group of friends.

Click for a larger version, if you feel you can withstand my furious poetry assault!! Comments and criticism are welcome, just remember that I never made claim to being a good poet.

Deviant

I put all my yams up on deviantART. Exposure rarely hurts, right?

俺のお絵かきの全て、deviantARTに、不味いやけど。詩型ない、な。

UTADA, Trent Reznor, Saul Williams and Radiohead

That would be a great combination, wouldn’t it? Sadly, the post is about their (separate) movements, which have caught my interest.

Utada Hikaru has announced via her blog that she’s currently working on both an English and a Japanese album. Despite (justified) reservations about her English ‘flow’, 2004’s Exodus was one of my favorite albums of that year, musically speaking. 2006’s Japanese-language release Ultra Blue was a bizzare, scattershot album with genre mixing at the song level that I thoroughly enjoyed. I’m very interested to see where ends up while apparently walking two divergent paths at the same time. Also potentially interesting is how she chooses to market the albums if they are finished within a short time of each other, given the incredible sales numbers Exodus did in Japan during a time when she had no recent Japanese offering available.

Trent Reznor has, on the other hand, completely finished his obligations to the establishment and struck out on his own. Circumventing the middle-man, he has co-produced The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, the new album from Saul Williams (check out this video from his 2004 album Saul Williams here, the track is utterly blistering). The album hits tomorrow and is only available via digital distribution, with all proceeds going directly to the people who made the music. The wacky thing is that they are offering the entire album for free in 192kbps MP3 format. Paying is optional. Radiohead did something similar recently, and I’m super interested in where this is all going.