THE SECOND ROOM
The Screen Flyer – My quirky little legacy in psychedelic trance

Eight and a half months is probably an unreasonably long time to go without updating my blogs. I admit this freely, but what can I say? Aside from lacking proper blogger discipline, I was distracted and more than a little burned out. So, yeah, I’ve been sidelined with other projects and “events” (big stressors, like moving house…) and by accident, I believe, I invented something, or at least was the first to do it in Japan’s psychedelic trance scene.

Let me bring you up to date. When I last updated, we were watching Sirius and Orion’s Belt swinging into alignment to mark the Winter Solstice, I had just finished a rather tiring six-part series on Psy-trance for the failed Japan Times Junior, and I was packing for a weeklong trip to New Caledonia. Upon my return from that paradise, while launching myself headlong into video editing, I had time to ponder some of the more disturbing events in our party scene over the past year. And I just could not summon the energy to devote myself to this media. There’s more, but I won’t bore you. (Being trapped in a front-row seat during a riot involving around 50 chimpilas in the lobby of Differ Ariake last winter was one of the “events” that gave me pause.)

Meanwhile, I was given a golden opportunity to experiment a bit in making promotion clips for a groovy little label and partymaker here in Tokyo. Dears Music International is trying it’s best to grow in this ever-risky environment. And I’ve enjoyed helping them out, including trying to introduce some of my own ideas for getting people back out to the party.

So at some point in the construction of the promo clip for the June 21 “Orbital – Ion Japan Tour” I decided to slip one of those ideas in and see what happened. On June 16, I finished the clip and on June 17 it was uploaded to Mixi (since Dears has an impressive following at the top Japan SNS.)

The first Screen Flyer was10 seconds of video after the credit screen – an image of the party flyer and the simple instructions in English, “Screen Flyer! Take a photo on your keitai for ￥500 off.” (For now, you can see the clip on my MySpace Video page.)

Unannounced, in English, and so close to the day of the party, it was not an overwhelming success. However, two people did show up and claimed the discount – the experiment worked. So I’ve decided to claim ownership on it as an original idea in psy-trance; I made the first video screen flyer, at least on purpose, I think.

My interest lies not in any real claim to fame, but in the evolution and history of such “underground” party advertisements, which you might be surprised to learn extends all the way back to the 1960s.

Interesting stuff -- the flyers for some of the famous Merry Pranksters’ Acid Test parties in California intentionally printed a false location on one side to throw off the authorities and hid the real location inside the artwork on the back. (LSD was actually legal until the mid-1960s. But Ken Kesey’s electric kool-aid parties – strikingly similar to today’s Psy-trance party format -- were usually a bit too much for The Man. Some things never change.)

It’s raining again in Tokyo. I’ve got a DJ gig with DMI tonight at Cube326, my first for them, just an hour. No camera tonight. The organizer doesn’t know that, I bet. Hope it goes well. Let’s see if Hanako can get a good photo of me tonight. (She’s the only one who can!)