by whocares1 » Tue Aug 02, 2016 3:06 am
Picky Picnic was an incredible and mysterious avant-garde Japanese band active in the 80's with enough conjecture and legend surrounding it to put it in a room with Les Rallizés Denudes. Their homo ludens style of combining new-wave and musical experiments of the time with children's music, drawing heavily from nursery rhyme-like tunes, created a one-of-a-kind sound that only met with limited domestic success. Some have said that one of the two members were arrested on drug charges and they disbanded, with one of the members, Kaoru Todoroki, later releasing an obscure solo album called Uncle Calvin's Private Life (I still haven't managed to find a decent rip of this on what.cd)
The internet as a music sharing medium brought them to new audiences and a spike of popularity among music communities interested in the vast world of obscure 80's japanese pop/new-wave, and their influence might be partly responsible for the popularity of sounds like Kero Kero Bonito or PC Music. The album that made the first splash was Ha! Ha! Tarachine
Rips from this album made up the majority of their revived success, the interesting thing being that this entire release, along with almost every other one until just recently, have been played at the wrong speed, 45 rpm. Here is the album as it was apparently intended to be heard, 33 rpm.
But by the time anyone who owned this obscure record got around to realizing this (this was before the 2012 re-release), the 45 rpm "version" had already been engraved into the hearts and minds of listeners like myself, and arguably into a sort of internet cultural memory. The tempo and pitch themselves were hallmarks of a sound that everyone believed was shamefully lost or ignored for decades by most of the world, and it's resurfacing and subsequent popularity felt like no small coincidence. The 45 rpm version is what I listened to three times a week, walking from school to the print shop to buy polyester plates for lithography and there's no overwriting that sort of time.
I might edit this post later to talk about how that reminded me of something Mario Carpo wrote about how technologising-shifts can create new forms out of already existing ones. This is a bit more than a classic case of 'lost in translation', as the element that was lost (or rather, gained) became the keystone of the entire sound. Also, the massive proliferation of a single original upload is something that could have only existed in the digital age, making the resilience of the mistake possible in the first place.