Thu 31 Jul 2014 20:00–24:00 @ FabCafe
1,000 JPY + 1 drink order *No Reservation Required
Talk: Damian Kulash, Yuri Suzuki, Rhizomatiks
DJ: Nao Tokui, Daito Manabe, Setsuya Kurotaki
Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of transformation. The four songs of the all-new Upside Out EP represent the first preview of Hungry Ghosts, due out in the fall on the band’s own Paracadute. This is the band’s fourth full-length and the newest addition to a curriculum vitae filled with experimentation in a variety of mediums.
The band worked with longtime producer and friend Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Weezer, MGMT), while also enlisting a new collaborator in Los Angeles, veteran Tony Hoffer, (Beck, Phoenix, Foster the People) to create their most comfortable and far-reaching songs yet. Building on (and deconstructing) 15 years of pop-rock smarts, musical friendship, and band-of-the-future innovations the EP, Upside Out, offers a concise overview of forthcoming Hungry Ghosts’ melancholic fireworks (“The Writing’s on the Wall”), basement funk parties (“Turn Up The Radio”), IMAX-sized choruses (“The One Moment”), and space-age dance floor bangers (“I Won’t Let You Down”).
Drawn from the same marching orders issued to big-hearted happiness creators as Queen, T. Rex, The Cars or Cheap Trick, and a lifetime of mixed tapes exchanged by lifelong music fans, Upside Out is a reaffirmation of the sounds and ideas that brought the band together in the first place. The four songs provide an assured kick-off to a new sequence of interconnected performances, videos, dances, and wild, undreamt fun.
“As the band has evolved over the last 15 years, the creative palette we work with has expanded in so many unexpected and gratifying directions,” says frontman Damian Kulash. “This record feels like it’s the musical manifestation of that — like we can speak in a clearer voice when we are playing in a bigger sandbox. Just as the band’s whole project became clearer to us as we learned to find more homes for our creativity — we triangulated it from more directions. And, I think the music itself has gotten more focused for similar reasons. We went in with fewer preconceptions of who we are or what our sound is, and came out with a record that sounds much more uniquely our own because of it.”
Continuing a career that includes viral videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire, collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.
Physical, Sound Art and Design
Born in Tokyo, Japan 1980
Live in London, UK 2004-
Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician who produces work that explores the realms of sound through exquisitely designed pieces.
Suzuki was born in Tokyo in 1980. between 1999 and 2005 he worked for Japanese art unit Maywa Denki, where he developed a strong interest in music and technology. In 2005 he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art. during this time he worked on some projects for Yamaha and Moritz Waldemeyer, and after his graduation in 2008 he opened his own studio in London.
Suzuki’s work raises questions of the relation between sound and people and how music and sound affect people’s mind. Suzuki’s sound art pieces and installations have been shown in exhibitions all around the world.
In 2013, he was appointed as a platform tutor Design Products department in Royal College of Art London, also started associate position for Disney, New Radiophonic Workshop and Teenage Engineering.
Same year, founded Yuri Suzuki Creative Lab which is R&D consultancy for several company such as Widen and Kennedy, KKoutlet and AIAIAI,