Hatsune Miku in Hatsune Miku Live Party 2011 39's Live in Sapporo

​See also:
*Hatsune Miku: Her Best Fan-Generated Videos
*Live review of Hatsune Miku in Los Angeles
*More photos of Hatsune Miku live in L.A.
*Hatsune Miku/Hello Kitty collaboration, Miku-Kitty, appears at Anime Expo.
*Local musicians Stephanie Yanez and Polo collaborate with Hatsune Miku.

Hatsune Miku Live Party 2011 39's Live in Sapporo
Rave 18 Movie Theater
11-10-11

Better than... Spending the night with "Ievan Polkka" stuck in my head.

The first rule of Hatsune Miku concerts is to bring glow sticks. They become part of the show.

The occasion was a one-night only broadcast of a recent concert from the virtual pop star called Hatsune Miku Live Party 2011 39's Live in Sapporo. The concert screened in nine cities across the U.S., giving fans the opportunity to witness an unusual performance that they may never have the chance to see in person.

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Shannon Cottrell

Hatsune Miku on stage in Los Angeles

​See also:
*Live review of Hatsune Miku in Los Angeles
*More photos of Hatsune Miku live in L.A.
*Hatsune Miku/Hello Kitty collaboration, Miku-Kitty, appears at Anime Expo.
*Local musicians Stephanie Yanez and Polo collaborate with Hatsune Miku.

Hatsune Miku isn't a conventional pop star. She's a computer-generated character that comes to life when someone uses the Vocaloid synthesizer application that bears her name and voice. Established acts like Japanese indie pop group The Aprils have recorded tracks with her. Scores of people dress up as her at anime conventions. She performed on stage at Nokia Theatre in July. Tomorrow night her live concert performance in Sapporo screens at the Rave 18 movie theater in Westchester.

Miku software has spawned a DIY music and art phenomenon. (Sadly, it's not yet available in the U.S.) Bedroom producers give Miku her songs, and artists from across the globe have fine-tuned her look and given her stories. The results are spread far and wide through video sharing services. And so, below, we've counted down five of the coolest Miku projects to arise from the fan community.

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Britt Brown

Amanda Brown

​See also: LA Vampires perform at Dem Passwords, 8/3/11

At Cafe Gratitude on Larchmont Boulevard, the menu items aren't labeled as soups or burgers or salads or whatever; instead, they're hippie affirmations, like "I Am Liberated" or "I Am Honoring." When the waitress delivers your order, she tweaks its moniker into the second person. "You are transformed," she says, placing my beans-and-squash tacos before me.

A fine vegan dish. But LA Vampires members Amanda Brown and her husband Britt Brown have ordered off the raw food side of the menu. Wearing bright red lipstick and big sunglasses -- her disordered dyed blonde hair running past her shoulders -- the 30-year-old former member of Pocahaunted imparts that they're practicing raw-fooders, a jaw-dropping dietary restriction in a city famous for them. "I've never done drugs," she says, "but you really get high on how good [raw foodism] makes you feel."

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Colin Young-Wolff

Yasmine Kittles of Tearist performing with Pictureplane

​Who: Pictureplane, oOoOO, Javelin, Babe Rainbow, Hollagramz
Where: Check Yo' Ponytail 2 @ The Echoplex
When: August 16, 2011

Better than... Tumbling psychedelic druid gifs all night.

With the increasing amount of references to witch house-- be it in supermodel photos marked with upside down crosses, psychedelic druid gifs, band names spelled with symbols, or songs that sound like a cross between shoegaze, hip-hop and industrial-- we were expecting Tuesday night's installment of Check Yo Ponytail 2 at the Echoplex to be sold out. After all Pictureplane -- aka Travis Egedy, the person frequently credited as having coined the term witch house -- was headlining, sharing the bill with buzzworthy artist oOoOO and others.

The crowd, though, was smaller than we'd expected. That's not to say it was a dead night. It wasn't. However, you could walk from the bar to the patio without really bumping into anyone, and there was ample dancing and seating space in the back. The bulk of the crowd huddled together in front of the stage and remained there from our time of arrival until after Pictureplane left the stage.

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Screen shot from The Beat Is Law

Jarvis Cocker on stage at Glastonbury

​On August 10, L.A. Pulp fans gathered at Cinefamily for a sold-out screening of The Beat Is Law: Fanfare for the Common People, part of this year's Don't Knock the Rock film festival. The movie is Eve Wood's follow-up to the stellar documentary Made in Sheffield, a must-see if you're a fan of bands like the Human League and Cabaret Voltaire. The Beat Is Law isn't essential viewing like its predecessor does; in fact, what it lacks raises some interesting questions.

The Beat Is Law is really three interconnected mini-documentaries. First is the story of mid-'80s Sheffield and Chakk, a next-big-thing sort of band who, though they didn't make it, founded the influential recording studio FON. Following that is the rise of Sheffield's house music scene. Connecting those two stories is Pulp, whose strange propulsion to fame after more than a decade of obscurity deserves feature-length documentary itself. The film's climax is Pulp's headlining engagement at the 1995 Glastonbury Festival, but because The Beat Is Law glosses over the early 1990s, there's a gaping hole in the story. Yet despite The Beat Is Law's missing pieces, the documentary is significant for another reason.

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Liz Ohanesian

ComputeHer live at Obsolete

​

Cristina Fuentes is a master of Game Boy beats.

She plays "8-bit" music, also known as "chip" music or "chiptunes," whose name references computer chips. What unites musicians of this genre is not so much a specific sound, but rather the technology they use to make it; vintage video games and computer equipment. Nintendo is the go-to brand -- Game Boys and old NES consoles-- and computer systems like the Commodore 64 are also frequently used and often combined with other instruments. Some artists have adopted the newer Nintendo DS as a tool. The sound can encompass anything from rock to synthpop to dubstep.

Fuentes has helped bring together L.A.'s small chip music community through a collective called Obsolete, which hosts a monthly showcase at Pixel Frequency. Last Saturday was the collective's third event.

"It's basically a group of 20 of us who have been doing individual shows all based on 8-bit," says Fuentes, an L.A.-based artist who is one half of the raucous duo Sonic Death Rabbit -- with Derrick Estrada, a.k.a. Baseck -- and performs solo as Wet Mango. "As of this year, I kind of hit up everybody who was doing similar things and decided to see if everyone wanted to work together to make one big party every month."

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Shannon Cottrell

​For more photos, see Shannon Cottrell's gallery, "Anime Expo at Night: Hatsune Miku in Concert, Tune in Tokyo at Club Nokia." Read more about Anime Expo 2011 in Style Council.

The big draw for this year for Anime Expo 2011 was Japan's virtual pop star. Hatsune Miku is a character developed by Crypton and associated with Vocaloid synthetic voice software who shot to fame after a series of viral videos. She's been remixed visually and musically by fans and has appeared on tracks with artist like Japanese indie pop group The Aprils and Southern California's own Stephanie Yanez.

Miku has been all over the convention. On Friday, Crypton announced a collaboration with Sanrio, Miku-Kitty, as well as the new video sharing site Mikubook.com and the development of an English language version of Miku, but the main event came Saturday night with the blue-haired character's concert debut in Los Angeles.

This was Miku's first concert appearance in the U.S. and, although video from the Tokyo shows have spread via YouTube, fans couldn't help but wonder how a live event would work with a singer who isn't really live.

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Liz Ohanesian

​
On June 19, Malediction Society, the Sunday night LADEAD party at Koreatown club The Monte Cristo dedicated to darkwave, industrial and other dark alternative sounds, celebrated its sixth anniversary. As has been the case in years past, the club's anniversary coincided with its annual Steampunk Ball. Last night's party, however, was less of an excuse to show off a new pair of goggles and more of a chance to celebrate friends made and songs spun by DJs Amanda Jones and Xian at the long-running gathering.

"I liken Malediction Society to a gothic Cheers," says one regular who goes by the name Boots. "You go there to hang out and everybody knows your name."

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Liz Ohanesian

Whiteqube live at Das Bunker

​On June 17 at Das Bunker, electronic duo Whiteqube played inside a white, LED lit cube on the stage in the largest room of the multi-dance floor club. The duo of Jason Schary and T. Ryan Arnold jumped up and down behind laptops, their LED jackets flashing words and images in bright white light. Occasionally they threw glow-sticks, neon balls and even an inflatable raft into the crowd. The audience of the largely full room was dancing wildly, screaming whenever there was a moment to breathe in between the songs.

It was only Whiteqube's second show.

Both members of the duo have extensive backgrounds in music. Arnold has played in a few bands and has scored films. Schary is best known as DJ Bractune and the guy behind Bractune Records, which has released work from Combichrist, Aesthetic Perfection and others. He spins regularly at Blue Mondays and has also turned up behind the decks at Bang!, Das Bunker and a host of other clubs across town. They began working on Whiteqube about a year ago.

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Marcin Wichary, Creative Commons via Wikipedia

Tommy Tallarico playing Video Games Live in 2009

​Today is the first day of E3, the annual event where video game companies unveil their latest products. There's a lot of hype surrounding the three-day show, but, unfortunately most people won't be able to get inside the Los Angeles Convention Center to see it. However, there is one E3-related event that is open to the public. Video Games Live will take place on June 8 at Nokia Theatre. The interactive concert, which will also feature Guitar Hero and costume contests, brings your favorite video game themes into the concert hall setting.

Wednesday night's show will be a can't-miss event. It's marks the 200th Video Games Live performance and brings the group behind the concerts back to the city where the project began. Also, since it's E3, there will be some special guests on stage. Kinuyo Yamishita, the original Castlevania composer, has already been announced and will be playing organ during the Castlevania portion of the performance.

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