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muja live at club dimension.

october 91th, 2007

My pal Miyako plays keyboards in a prog band called Muja. Their music has repetitive, heavy, metronomic, mathy parts with a big low sound. (Bass guitar, bass keyboards, no guitar!). They also have quiet parts with ethereal keys, no percussion, and crazy operatic / Yoko Ono singing. Guess which parts i like? Exactly. What else is cool about Muja is that they don't just hit notes on a stage, they PERFORM. Certain parts of songs require the musicians not just to play a riff but also move their body in a certain way. The performers grapple with each other, do high-kicks, pull crazy faces, and other stuff. I know it sounds like some hippy bullshit but they have a sense of humor about it so it is ok.

This particular show went down something like this:

I wake up from a nap and jump on a bike, and bust ass to get down there barely in time. . . .but it turns out not only is she playing 4 th, but every other band is sad-assed 40 year old glam (visual kei)l bands still trying to make it big. AND SHE DIDN’T WARN ME. One prog band and 4 sad hairspray rockers, playing to 4 high school girls who clustered fearfully in the corner. I thought she must have been trying to get revenge on me! One guy ? an old dude in camoflauge flares ? spent like 200 hours playing acoustic guitars with a sad song. I imagined his ideal audience as like a little Russian guy and a grotesquely overweight black lady, both in their 60s, making out right in front of him and traumatizing the high-schoolers. Muja , though, when they finally played it was tight! I didn't get the yoko ono singing-y bits but the prog workout was cool plus the facial expressions were dope.