Kama Aina

I like to think, mainly because it makes me feel less pathetic, that everyone who went to college and studied something other than business administration had some kind of youthfully pretentious obsession. Mine was Marshall McLuhan, the new media oracle from the Great White North who looked like a professorial Salvador Dali, had a cameo in a Woody Allen movie (nay, the best. cameo. ever.) and was an astoundingly salient bullshitter. I ain’t saying I don’t still love the man, just that nearly a decade after graduation it’s funny to look back and think of taking my dog-eared copy of War and Peace in the Global Village to my bartending gig at Benihana and intensely and conspicuously reading it between mixing Mai-Tais—as if any of my Japanese coworkers gave a damn. We were so cool once, weren’t we? Anyhow, I think of McLuhan’s fabled “global village” now because two of my favorite Japanese acts (the other one is Cacoy) this year have come to me from the Danish label Rumraket, which is doing for non-European music in Europe what Minty Fresh has been doing for European music in the U.S. of late—namely, rockin’ it. Kama Aina, whose name is Hawaiian and whose sole member is Takuji Aoyagi, doesn’t rock it, per se, he soothes it with loopy little lullabies built around clean, undistorted percussion, guitar and other sweet, naturalistic sounds. “Hotaru” is prettiest on headphones, where you can nearly see each bang and pluck. But if you’re just not that visual, check out the video for “Glasgow Sky,” which is as inventive as Bjork and twice as contemplative.

myspace.com/clubkamaaina
www.rumraket.net