Petronia

Mylène Farmer - Peut-être toi: recently I had the brilliant idea of looking up Mylène Farmer PMVs on Youtube - those I haven't seen yet, that is. The first thing I found was a clip she did in 2005 with Production IG and Geneon USA. orz

It's not particularly entertaining, though, compared to gems such as the following:

L'ame-Stram-Gram: real WTFLOL!Japanphilia.
California: I once tried to write BL origfic loosely based on this plot.
Fuck Them All: Mylène Farmer's never acknowledged as a visual-kei j-rock predecessor; neither are Strawberry Switchblade. But they are. AND SHE IS.
QI: French - the NSFW language.
Que mon coeur lache: in which the Son of God kills Michael Jackson, but it's an accident. I think.
Je te rends ton amour: I'M NOT EVEN SURE WHAT'S GOING ON HERE.

I could go on like this indefinitely but it's better to stop. XD

Led Zeppelin - Since I've Been Loving You: it's surprisingly difficult to find Led Zeppelin vids on Youtube, because for every clip of actual LZ there are about 1,320 clips of tribute bands and/or "HAY GUYZ I TAPED MYSELF PLAYING LED ZEP ON MY GEETAR". ...Or maybe not surprising.

I've watched all of The Song Remains The Same - piecemeal, several times over - because T's dad puts the tape in whenever there isn't anything else on TV that's good (at least, more immediately compelling than Led Zep in concert). After a while you feel this surge of sympathy for Aoike Yasuko because yr avg Jimmy Page solo is enough time to AU the band three times over let alone the once. AND IT'S AWESOME. There's no way to be ironic about this stuff, not even when the tambourine comes out.

I figure a lot of you peeps my age or younger have never actually seen the young Robert Plant do the hands on hips hair flippy thing so you owe that to yourself at least. XD

EDIT (so I don't lose the link): Alizée - JBG (James Bond Girl). Noir anime fanvid. Best idea ever, or bestest idea ever?

Actually, when I was in the shower just now I composed an essay in my head regarding what Oshitari feels about Atobe in my ficverse (or what Atobe's existence in Oshitari's personal sphere - rather than vice versa! - means to him given the sort of person Oshitari is, is probably a more accurate way of putting it), but I think most of you would rather get music videos. XD;; At any rate it's 2AM in these parts.

Pet Shop Boys - Domino Dancing (44MB): mitethe very kindly found and uploaded this so I could get it. ^^ PSB videos come in several loose categories: the ones in which they do horrible traumatizing dances in horrible traumatizing hats/outfits [1], the ones where they stand there and sing (in Neil's case, Chris just stands) while drama is hinted at through emoting dancers and lighting effects [2], the ones that are stories about straight folks having relationship psychodrama even when the song itself is exceedingly gay, and (my favorite) the ones in which astonishingly beautiful people swan about doing whatever it is that beautiful people do and dull normals don't. "Domino Dancing" falls in the last two categories, except the song is not at all slashy [3] but the video uhh well. XD IIRC the boys swear the effect was unintentional in the PopArt DVD commentary track but then they also claim they didn't realise "So Hard" was a double entendre until after the single was released, so.

I also like the roles they give themselves in their story-oriented videos. XD While the beautiful people are having drama on the dancefloor, Chris is the little DJ in the funny hat and Neil is the guy holding up the wall and mumbling to himself.

Yaoi Theatre 3000 (23MB): got this off Tania. I imagine it's made the rounds but if you haven't seen it it's worth the download - a spoof of a spoof, sort of meta-spoof as it were. There's one line in it that made me lose it completely, see if you can guess what it is. XD What it really needs is a version 2.0 that includes clips of Prince of Tennis.


[1] That have been known to traumatize entire small Eastern European countries. In retrospect you can see how making a vaguely Russian Socialist Realism-styled video for a song called "Go West" young man, to San Francisco might have come across as a bit gratuitously threatening.

[2] Such as disco strobes refracted off David Bowie's jewelry.

[3] Unless you think it's about Kagetora.

Work's been a bit mad this last week. But here's a music post while I have a breather. :D

Lansing-Dreiden - The Advancing Flags
Lansing-Dreiden - Laid In Stone
Lansing-Dreiden - Desert Lights

Selected tracks off Lansing-Dreiden's The Incomplete Triangle, which I ordered off Kemado Records the other week. It's... basically I can't shake off the impression that they set out deliberately to make a fake!New Order album just so they could design a fake!Peter Saville sleeve for it. And why not? It's easier said than done. Let alone done in the Formalist manner Lansing-Dreiden adopted: if you fold the cardboard CD sleeve back on itself the white lines join up into a triangle shape. Each "side" is four songs. Each four-song group is in a different style, loosely corresponding to errrm Closer, Movement and Low-Life. XD;; ...Not exactly, of course, there's other stuff in there. I hear My Bloody Valentine, a touch of the Beach Boys. The songs are, by the way, amazing.

Lansing-Dreiden insists it's a corporate multimedia design collective that decorates the interior of art galleries and such, and only a pop band some of the time. Their media communiqués are lit-theory balderdash. All quite intentionally over the top, but - it would appear - way too subtle. 90% of online reviews run along the lines of "they're pretentious art-school wankers but we forgive them because the music is good," except Pitchfork which was like "never mind the music, they commit the unforgiveable sin of being even more pretentious wankers than we are." The other 10% grokked the joke. XD

Depeche Mode - Halo
Depeche Mode - Halo (Goldfrapp Remix)

(With the original, for comparison's sake.) Never got around to posting this remix to lj, though I peddled it over MSN to all and sundry, and in any case it was hanging around in my download folder for so long flisters with proper initiative should have it already. XD But if not, this is a must-listen.

Here's the thing. Depeche Mode remixes fall into one of three broad categories: A) the 8-minute house/trance mix that sounds like Underworld, B) the clanky industrial mix that sounds like NIN, and C) the mix that sounds exactly like the remixer's own work (vis. Air, Ulrich Schnauss, Mike Shinoda out of Linkin Park). Whereas Alison Goldfrapp... The effect is difficult to describe. It starts with a harp. Then Dave Gahan's voice comes in - "you wear guilt / like shackles on your feet / like a halo in reverse" - the production lush and curiously flattened, as if it's all taking place on the same perspectiveless plane. One imagines the saint in a pre-Giotto wood icon, sporting a halo of applied beaten gold. Rising chords, ballet-music tremolo strings (Debussy? Saint-Saen?), child-angel voices in an echo chamber, an opera sample... I barely experience it as music; it's like listening to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Proserpine.

Chemistry - Pieces Of A Dream (DJ Watarai Remix): Soulful j-boybander ballad, quasi m-flo production. Someone said this was an Inui & Renji song, no? It is for me, anyway, I wax utterly sentimental listening to this (and used it to close one of my personal favorite mixes). Will translate the lyrics when I have time.

Iron Maiden - Dream of Mirrors: the GetBackers Voodoo Child arc as told through nine minutes of prog-metal. No, really, t3h Maiden's as good as saved me a chapter or two's worth of translation. XD "Lost! In a dream of mirrors! Lost! In a paradox!"

The Raitei track that follows the above in my (cheesy, dramatic, decidedly proggy) Mugenjou FST: UNKLE feat. Ian Brown and Mani - Reign. Like one of those dance tracks featuring Robert Smith, only with the Stone Roses and... not really dance. Epic-battle strings, like Massive Attack going to war. One mostly can't tell whether it's "reign" or "rain" in the lyrics, which is intentional.

Lastly, in honour of sakura season, a video: Tsuji Ayano - Sakura no ki no shita de. It's one of my favorites. Something about the imagery grabs and shakes me, almost to the point of tears. The theme song to an imaginary film based on a famous pre-war Japanese novel that was never written. (Here's the mp3.)