Fujiyama!
December 3rd, 2007
Okay, this is the last thing I will mention about Japan.
I don’t know that I ever got around to saying how bad I thought Lonely Planet guide books are but that was my conclusion. They’re not fun anymore. They’re made for your granma. On the other hand, the Time Out Tokyo book did have plenty of interesting things to do and see. In the music shops section there is a small personal recommendation by a guy called Cornelius, who’s a Japanese musician. I don’t know his stuff but I do seem to recall that Amon Tobin may have remixed one of his songs. Anyway, Cornelius mentions this shop, Fujiyama and as luck would have it, it was just down the road from where my sister is living.
It’s a smoky little joint full of offerings from young indie musicians. From all genres but all tending to be on the raw side.
The guy running the place is really nice. The hours the pllace is open are irregular but if you go past and it’s open, it’ll be open all night. It’s a shame there’s not really anything like this in Seoul.
Here are a couple of sample tracks from the bunch of stuff I lucky-dipped on and bought. I can’t reproduce the track names properly because they’re in Japanese. the first is from Izumi Kunihiro, his album, Siesta and Walk and Music. Track [3.5Mb].
The second was from a compilation of artists recorded in 2001, the title of the album being Tone Poem Archives. The track selected is by Labcry, it’s name is in Japanese and is here [8.4Mb]
