This is part of why I now cut my own hair. Plus, it’s cheaper!
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Artist: DJ Okawari
Label: Libyus Music
Album: Diorama
Year: 2008
Track: Tayutau
Genre: Instrumental Hip Hop
Japanese DJ from Shizuoka. You can tell he has got a little bit of a Nujabes influence. Strong Asian flavours, uses a lot of piano/keyboard, and draws from some ‘nature’ samples to create the mood.
His other full album, Mirror, has more vocals than this album and is a little more jazzy. There are a couple tracks here and there that basically sound the same, but overall still a good listen if you’re trying to relax with some nice beats. I’ll do a critique of Mirror in another post.
He’s got a few more releases that are a couple tracks each, which are also featured in the full-length albums (just with separate covers), and a mix done for Libyus Music with tracks by Fat Jon, Force of Nature, and some others as well.
I love the cover art for all of his records. Here’s the cover for Diorama:
Track List:
01.Evening Comes
02.Chocolate with agehah
03.Bluebird Story with Jumelles
04.Ring
05.Colors of Life
06.Synchronize
07.One for U
08.Aurora with Eri Kamiya
09.Coffee Break
10.Crescent Moon
11.TAYUTAU
12.Silent Night
13.Animal Forest
14.Times Fusion
To be honest, I like most of this album a lot, but it has been a long time since I’ve listened to this again, so I can’t single anything out in particular for you even though I’ve just gone through the whole album again. That said, it is much easier to spot out the things I don’t like about the album, as I will proceed to do (and oddly enough, they’re both tracks with vocals).
“Chocolate” featuring agehah is for the most part a goodtrack. I just find it a little weird, maybe because agehah says some things like “Your mother loves me, your father loves me” near the opening of the track (and a couple other places), and sometimes she sounds like she’s out of breath. Maybe that’s just her style, I don’t know.
Also on this album, the track “Aurora” featuring Eri Kamiya has a melody that is ridiculously repetitive, and it starts to grind a bit. Yes, hip hop is repetitive at times, but it’s not a broken record. I can’t sit through more than a minute of this 5-minute track.
Overall, this is a good record if you want something to relax to and use as background music, but I don’t think it’s really hard enough to jam to, and it doesn’t stand out in any particular way. It’s still nice and easy listening.
If you’re having trouble finding his other tracks, here’s a Grooveshark link. His website is djokawari.com. Happy listening!
Wonton Recipe for Neal
totally unrelated to music and photography. WHATEVER MAN
»»» INGREDIENTS
ground pork, green onions, shiitake mushrooms, tree fungus, maybe bamboo shoots, salt, egg, wonton skins (square, thinner than regular dumpling skins, and starched with cornstarch; get the kind that doesn’t have egg)
»»» CREATION
soak your dry shiitake mushrooms and dry tree fungus in water until they are no longer dry. the mushrooms take forever to soak
mince all the things that are not ground pork.
mash/knead/mix your ground pork throughly (preferably with your hands) so that it is smoooth and well-mixed. add a couple pinches of salt for flavour (a little bit is enough)
add some of the non-pork things to the pork and mix well. check if you’ve added enough for your taste after you’ve mixed it. NOt enough? add more until satisfied with pork-to-stuff ratio
clean your hands
crack a raw egg into an empty saucer. break the yolk and mix it a little. get a small, shallow spoon for the egg. get a pair of chopsticks or something for the meat.
take a piece of wonton skin and put a little meat in the middle. don’t put too much or it won’t close.
take a little bit of egg with your spoon and spread it on the skin around the meat just enough that when you pinch the skin together it will stay in place. (don’t put too much or it’ll get messy)
pinch the wonton skin together firmly where the egg is to seal the meat in. they’re usually in the shape of a comet, where the ball of meat is the head of the comet and the tail of the comet is the extra skin.
»»» COOKING
boil water in a pot
drop some into water. wait until they are floating, then cook for about a minute more
remove from water
»»» EATING
sometimes people use vinegar to dip the wonton in. usually red vinegar.
»»» STORAGE
you can put batches into ziploc bags, maybe like one serving per bag for easy access. put them in the freezer. when you freeze them, they will stick together, but they will come apart when you cook them.
you either want to cook them or freeze them. don’t put them into the refrigerator.
We had a weekend of snow a few weeks ago. Took this picture with my (new-ish) phone, a Samsung Exhibit II. No edits from the original.. Probably should have fixed the colour balance but oh well, too lazy. Wasn’t even holding the phone straight…
I am thinking about turning this blog from just photos to photos plus music, since I haven’t been taking that many interesting pictures. I will just share some tracks by uploading and/or linking plus a short description. It might get hipster real fast since I have been listening to a lot of low profile stuff recently.
Gonna advertise myself a bit more and let you know that I finally have a deviantArt account! Avoided it for the past 8 years because of all the weird amateur weeaboo shit, but I see there is a lot of good stuff up there now. Haven’t posted my art in ages, and I haven’t touched the old site that I used to post on (not that I draw comics any more so there’s no point).
Cheers
It weirds me out that people on tumblr call images like these ‘tumblr faces’ when in fact they are actually ‘rage faces’. Half of them are of unknown origin, some are from 4chan, and quite a few are, surprisingly, from reddit.
So, tumblr, stop pretending that you’re so cool and nobody understands you. Half of you are a bunch of teenaged pubescent girls crying about how your first world problems are so depressing.
Also, do NOT call the Neil DeGrasse Tyson rage face “black guy face”. For shame.
And for those of you who scream ‘heresy’, here’s a little something for you:
http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/d38tq/im_bored_at_work_and_i_want_to_make_an/
Drum and Bass
I’ve been listening to quite a bit of DnB in the last few days. If you’re into it, check this radio out. Their DJ has pretty good taste on the whole, and you won’t notice the track changes unless you’re trying to find the edges on purpose.
Artist: DJ Okawari
Label: Libyus Music
Album: Diorama
Year: 2008
Track: Tayutau
Genre: Instrumental Hip Hop
Japanese DJ from Shizuoka. You can tell he has got a little bit of a Nujabes influence. Strong Asian flavours, uses a lot of piano/keyboard, and draws from some ‘nature’ samples to create the mood.
His other full album, Mirror, has more vocals than this album and is a little more jazzy. There are a couple tracks here and there that basically sound the same, but overall still a good listen if you’re trying to relax with some nice beats. I’ll do a critique of Mirror in another post.
He’s got a few more releases that are a couple tracks each, which are also featured in the full-length albums (just with separate covers), and a mix done for Libyus Music with tracks by Fat Jon, Force of Nature, and some others as well.
I love the cover art for all of his records. Here’s the cover for Diorama:
Track List:
01.Evening Comes
02.Chocolate with agehah
03.Bluebird Story with Jumelles
04.Ring
05.Colors of Life
06.Synchronize
07.One for U
08.Aurora with Eri Kamiya
09.Coffee Break
10.Crescent Moon
11.TAYUTAU
12.Silent Night
13.Animal Forest
14.Times Fusion
To be honest, I like most of this album a lot, but it has been a long time since I’ve listened to this again, so I can’t single anything out in particular for you even though I’ve just gone through the whole album again. That said, it is much easier to spot out the things I don’t like about the album, as I will proceed to do (and oddly enough, they’re both tracks with vocals).
“Chocolate” featuring agehah is for the most part a goodtrack. I just find it a little weird, maybe because agehah says some things like “Your mother loves me, your father loves me” near the opening of the track (and a couple other places), and sometimes she sounds like she’s out of breath. Maybe that’s just her style, I don’t know.
Also on this album, the track “Aurora” featuring Eri Kamiya has a melody that is ridiculously repetitive, and it starts to grind a bit. Yes, hip hop is repetitive at times, but it’s not a broken record. I can’t sit through more than a minute of this 5-minute track.
Overall, this is a good record if you want something to relax to and use as background music, but I don’t think it’s really hard enough to jam to, and it doesn’t stand out in any particular way. It’s still nice and easy listening.
If you’re having trouble finding his other tracks, here’s a Grooveshark link. His website is djokawari.com. Happy listening!
Wonton Recipe for Neal
Drum and Bass
