Tokyo, by The Books

Created by YouTube user shonkeyproductions, this video features a favorite song of mine: Tokyo, by The Books, from their album The Lemon of Pink. Despite a bit of shaky camera work in the middle sections, I think this video captures the song nicely… although the audio is a little on the low side. If you want to hear a better version of the track, try here (I’d recommend headphones).

I had first heard of them thanks to my friend Ben, who included Tokyo in a playlist he had posted online. While I’ve heard a few other tracks from the group, I still haven’t gotten this album (but plan to rectify that today).

Tokyo is a song I can listen to repeatedly, over and over. Trust me when I say that I have a tendency to loop a song 50+ times without even blinking. This song was one I’ve listened to a lot before, and I always seem to hear/find something I missed, with each listen. It was also partly an inspiration for my Colourful Echo project, as I wanted to find a way to animate the song.

In a crazier moment, I had contemplated trying to transcribe all the various instruments at work here, and build each one and sync it via Flash. While it’s still a distant possibility, that concept seemed way too difficult to do just with my ears.

As I’m listening to this song today, I’m thinking of revisiting the code I used for my Astronaut project, which combined audio with Flickr. Instead of words from the lyrics, I’d just be searching against the keyword/tag “tokyo,” and time out images with the song. Gotta think on this some more, but it’s got my brain humming in a good way, and it feels like another project.