It’s a digital electric guitar, from 1984! It was called the SynthAxe, and it digitised the input from the (separate!) sets of strings on the neck and body and then output a MIDI signal.

If you’re wondering what the future currently looks like, here’s the Misa Digital Guitar:

(It’s a video). “running linux kernel 2.6.31″ – hell yeah!

Die Ärzte – Yoko Ono

I first saw this one on William Gibson’s blog – he also thoughtfully provided an outstanding Babelfish attempt at the lyrics.

For a while, the video ran through my head every time I stepped into the lift at work.

Die Ärzte – Manchmal haben Frauen…

Aye Naujawan Hai Sab Kuchch Yahan

It’s from Apradh, an Indian movie from 1972.

Going back to the main room after the morning tea break one day to do a last minute check, I discovered some damn kids had disconnected the speakers and projector from the lectern computer and were using them to play this:

The Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar

It’s directed by Michel Gondry (There’s also an interesting making-of). One of the kids was enthusing about the technology that went into making the video – but I must have watched to at least a third of the way through before realising that it wasn’t just straight film from a train window.

Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Anyway, the song is pure Tommy february⁶, and the video’s fun too:

Takashi Fujii – OH MY JULIET!

Tommy february⁶ – ♥KISS♥ ONE MORE TIME

I liked the following one particularly because of Toni L, who shows up from 3:25 onwards:

Torch feat. Toni L – Wir waren mal Stars

a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won’t heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don’t, they don’t speak for us.
I’ll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon monoxide,

with no alarms and no surprises…

–Radiohead, No Surprises. The video is excellent too.

Then her husband took out his pocket watch.

“One hour, Marcie. I’ll give you one hour,” he said. “If you’re not back by then, you can find your own way home.”

She walked for half an hour with her bare feet in the frothy edge of the sea, then turned back along the cliff path, and from the shelter of some trees, watched her husband, at five minutes past the appointed hour, slam the car door and turn the ignition. Just as he was gathering speed, she jumped into the road and stopped the car.

Then she climbed in and spent the rest of her life with a man who would have gone home without her.

–Claire Keegan, Close to the Water’s Edge

A moment of silence followed. The eyes she turned on me seemed to lack any depth. The dessicated shadow of a smile flickered at the corners of her mouth, suggesting a kind of hushed sense of resignation.

“I’m married now,” she said. “To an accountant three years my senior. And I have two children, a boy and a girl. We have an Irish setter. I drive an Audi and I play tennis with my friends twice a week. That’s the life I’m living now.”

–Haruki Murakami, Birthday Girl

• Melodies from Mars by Aphex Twin – an unreleased album supposedly commissioned by a computer game company as a soundtrack, and then never used. The instrumentation on Katamari Damacy is so similar in places that I imagine the composers must have been fans of this album. In particular: songs Sasasan Katamari and The Wonderful Star’s Walk is Wonderful.
• Wendy Carlos’s Clockwork Orange score – a couple of the tracks (Fugue #7777 and Katamari March Damacy) use something like Wendy’s ‘voice synth’ from her 9th Symphony, Fourth Movement.
• Gatas Parlament – crazy Norwegian anarcho-communist hip-hop. There’s no real connection here, I think I’m just a sucker for fun hip-hop in languages not normally associated with hip-hop, and the Katamari Damacy track “The Moon and the Prince” has that, and is a good song besides .