This totally charming SL music video incorporates Japanese-themed locations with Japanese pop music, and there's a very good reason for that: Both the video and the music are by Yasushi Watanabe, and if you follow J-Pop, you're probably already familiar with his music.
"He composes music for many Japanese major singers including AKB48 and Nogizaka46 (do you know these big groups of Japanese girls?) He composed some music for anime and games too." (He also composed this banger by Guilty Kiss.)
To promote his spin-off project, called BYNORAL, Sanny tells me Watanabe returned to Second Life recently, since he had first explored the platform almost a decade ago:
This is not surprising, because founder and lead singer Roman Rappak was greatly inspired by a chance encounter he had with a taxi driver who told him about his second life.
If you listen carefully, in fact, you can even hear a snippet of audio from that conversation in “I Used To Say Things To Strangers” (above), one of the band's latest videos. In it, the driver is telling Roman about his alternate life in a Second Life community for Zen Buddhists.
“He kept talking about ‘this world’, as if his life in Second Life was much more important,” Roman tells me now, with wonder.
It helped him realize that “entire populations are more at home or feel more effective in the virtual world and have a greater level of agency there as opposed to the real world.”
Rappak got out of the cab, he recalls, “feeling amazed and scared.”
That was about three years ago, roughly around the time that the Brexit vote, which was greatly influenced by Cambridge Analytica’s manipulation of social media, had upended Britain, setting it on an unknowable course. “In a way Cambridge Analytica was a massively multiplayer RPG (Facebook) that made something fictional a reality,” Roman now observes.
With those two incidents, “I went through a complete epiphany, on how nothing a band can do can be a statement unless it adapts to the tools of the era.”
He means that in the same way how, in another era, artists like Jimi Hendrix used the latest technology in the 60s to create a sound that came to define that decade. It’s not enough to express how much of a change we’re going through, Roman believes, unless bands of this era adopt the technology of today.
“Things like Second Life say more just by existing than anything bands are doing,” as he puts it. "We should have gigs where after people leave, they feel like they had a view into a virtual world.”
Miro Shot has been doing just that over the last few years, performing shows where the audience wears VR headsets, putting them into an XR experience of the virtual and real. (The band even describes itself as “an AR/VR band/collective”.
A lot of these thoughts are reflected in this Miro Shot video and others. And while they also feature sardonic or darkly ironic images of technology use, it would be a mistake to assume their intent is anti-technology:
You run Soliloquy, and type in your thoughts and feelings about COVID-19 and the quarantine/lockdown. When you type in a keyword, the ambient music evolves to correspond to that mood:
Update, March 26: Seth just let me know the event has now been changed to be a fundraising drive to help combat COVID-19: "This Return Concert will be a benefit with 100% of your donations going to help the World Health Organization's effort to battle Coronavirus," he tells me. "Please consider making a donation. [I] will not have any tip jars at the event, but there will be clickable banners to the WHO donation page at the event. You can also click here to donate directly to WHO."
Here's the kind of live event we haven't seen for quite awhile in Second Life: This coming Sunday (March 29) at 2pm Pacific, musician Seth Regan (known as Mankind Tracer in SL) is returning after a long absence from the virtual world to perform live in a four sim-wide concert. The temporary sims come courtesy of Linden Lab, which is also promoting the show on its official social media channels and in the SL viewer itself.
Mr. Tracer amassed a relatively large fanbase within Second Life in his heyday there, but hasn't performed in SL since 2016 -- and that was for a fundraiser to benefit the children of his good friend and manager, after she tragically lost her life to cancer. Late last year, however, he approached Linden Lab with the idea for this month's free show [now a fundraising event to help the fight Coronavirus -- see update above] with any event donations going half to the American Heart Association and half to his mother, who suffers from heart disease.
Tracer tells me Linden Lab was happy to help sponsor the show with the free sims and promotion:
This current project, as the title suggests, was inspired by the landmark book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and incorporates music from Bach himself. As Robert explains in his liner notes:
This piece started life as a collection of renderings from a machine learning process which was trained on a large database of works by Bach. I then curated some fragments from it and used them as a starting point for a composition for string trio.... We wanted to explore having the audience interact live with the music in a collective strange loop, so I constructed the piece in two "levels" which the players could move between at any time. Level 1 was calmer and more introspective and represented by Blue. Level 2 was more chaotic and extroverted and represented by Red. When the piece was performed the audience held up colored cards, which were recognized by a machine learning camera on the stage. This fed a signal to the players which told them which musical notation to read.
So this is, as Robert puts it to me now, "music composed in collaboration with an AI, which was trained on Bach, then performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, with the audience interacting, guiding the music. Aspects of the music were inspired by themes in Gödel, Escher, Bach, though: At the start and end you hear kinda shepherd tones played by the strings; these are one of the strange loops referred to in Marcus du Sautoy's talk about [Hofstader's book]."
This is a new teaser for "Hello Astronauts", the next concept album from Chouchou, the Japanese duo which launched its music career over a decade ago by performing live in Second Life. Since then they've gone on to gather a pretty large following, but if you're most familiar with Chouchou through its dreamy, otherworldly SL sim, this latest project will evoke similar feelings of dreamy otherworldliness. As Chouchou's spokesperson tells me:
Ooort? It is, as the band's spokesperson told me: "[It's] the cloud-like origin of comets that are considered that they had information of creatures and struck the earth in ancient times. And that is how life arrived on earth, so it might be the origin of us."
I wrote "sims" because that will include The Babel, the band's reactive music experience that hasn't been in Second Life since 2013. (See above.) "[It] will be back in Second Life thanks to Linden Lab's kind arrangements," Chouchou's spokesperson says.
Even better news: While other classic sims have been restored by Linden Lab, only to become non-interactive ghost towns, Chouchou tells me the band and its management will maintain a live presence in them:
At long last here is Fablewave Deluxe from Keiko Takamura, the Bay Area-based popstar who (as longtime NWN readers know) first launched her singing career over a decade ago by performing in Second Life. And as you would expect, it's sharp and smart, dazzling pop music for geeks -- inspired by games The Path, Alice: Madness Returns, and speed-running platformers, plus The Little Mermaid and Batman: The Animated Series.
"Fablewave Deluxe is my attempt to connect listeners to my experiences through video games, fairy tales, and pop culture," as she puts it. "You don't know me, but you probably vaguely know the story of The Little Mermaid. So you can connect to 'She's Got Legs, You Idiot' when I say, 'This world is so new and/ I almost feel human'. You don't know me, but you probably know what happens to Batman's parents. So when I write a love song called 'Martha Wayne', you can guess that it's bittersweet. Musically, I wanted each song to be its own vignette. Each song exists in a separate environment where the song has the best chance to tell its story, uninhibited by genre. My biggest influences going into this were Shiina Ringo, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and the SF Bay Area chiptune scene."
And yes, her SL fans will connect with one song on the album in particular:
