Go mad for Fujiya & Miyagi
By Kernan Andrews
THEIR NAME makes them sound like a Japanese pop duo but Fujiya & Miyagi are in fact an electronic dance trio from Brighton who play the Róisín Dubh on Friday June 19 at 9pm.
Fujiya & Miyagi are mask-wearing technicians dissecting music, keen to magnify particles of sound to create a pulsing antidote to the ordinary. They speak in tongues, using language as a rhythm, picking words that sound good, rhyming ‘jigsaws’ with ‘carnivores’.
However their influences are not all techno and electronic as their music resonates with the influences of German 1970s rock (they love Neu! and Kraftwerk), deep soul, early Human League, and the grooves of Talking Heads’ off-shoot Tom Tom Club - as can be experienced on their album Lightbulbs (Full Time Hobby).
The trio - David Best (guitars and vocals), Steve Lewis (synths, beats, programming), and Matt Hainsby (bass) - commendably stay away from lyrical themes that have been done to death. Using old synths to punctuate their beautifully-observed anecdotes on romantic triumphs and disasters, heroes and villains and the world at large, their rhythms palpitate to produce modern symphonies like no-one else.
In short, they sound like a bit of every genre condensed into three minute chunks of infectious pop music, a strange hybrid of James Brown on Valium and Wire gone pop. Or maybe Serge Gainsbourg with a PhD in electronics backed by David Byrne’s Eno-produced scratchy guitar mixed by MF Doom. It’s Darwinism gone mad!
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago. Support is from the exciting Galway based band Lost Chord led by Dave Phelan. Gugai will be DJing afterwards.
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