Les derniers sakura ont tombés il y déjà quelques jours a Tokyo. C’est un des signes qui ne trompent pas... l’été arrive à grands pas! Autre signe à surveiller, l’annonce de la programmation des différents festivals d’été. À chaque année, c’est la compétition entre Summer Sonic et Fuji Rock pour qui offrira les artistes les plus courus. Mais cette année un fait qui frappe est que plusieurs artistes décident simplement d’alterner les deux…

Ainsi, on retrouvera cette année au festival de Makuhari Messe ; Kasabian et CSS. Deux des groupes qui ont marqué la programmation de l’édition 2008 de Fuji Rock. On peut y retrouver également Teenage Fanclub, Soulwax et 2 many DJ’s qui ont également fait vibrer les collines de Naeba il y a deux ans.

Inversement, cette année Fuji Rock aligne quelques artistes qui étaient de passage à Chiba l’an dernier. Par example The Shoes et Polysics étaient tous les deux présents à Summer Sonic l’an dernier, mais il faudra aller à Fuji Rock pour les voir cette année.

Certain pourrait être déçu par ce qui semble répétitif. Mais personnellement, j’étais présent aux concerts de tous ces groupes tant à Fuji Rock que Summer Sonic l’an dernier et je peux vous assurer que ces artistes ont offert peut-être les meilleurs représentations de chaque festivals. Ils sont donc plus que les bienvenus d’être de retour sur les scènes nippones pour performer encore cette année !

Sébastien-Philippe Fortin

Fuji Rock 2009 lineup

3:28 PM

The next group of artists have been revealed for Fuji Rock along with the days that all of the acts will be performing on.

Here is the list of bands that were added to Fuji Rock’s lineup today:

Kenichi Asai
Cage The Elephant
Chara
Cobra Starship
Crying Nut
Curly Giraffe
A Flood of Circle
Friction
Guitar Wolf
Jimmy Eat World
Low IQ and the Beat Breaker
Mass of the Fermenting Dregs
The Neville Brothers
Orquesta de la Luz
Shibusashirazu
Soil & “Pimp” Sessions
Soul Flower Union
Sunnyday Service
Takkyu Ishino
Tom Freund
Trashcan Sinatras
White Lies
Wilko Johnson
Zunoukeisatsu
DJ Tei Towa
Ken Ishii
Yoji (ex.Yoji-Biomehanika)

The full schedule can be found on Fuji Rock's official site.

MySpace sites for all the artists playing the fest can be found here.

Shawn

6:23 PM

"It's the best festival in the world. There's a lot of excitement and craziness, but the people are just so cool. At most festivals you're stuck in a tent somewhere. At Fuji I can walk around and talk to all the people. That really makes me happy."

So said Patti Smith in a telephone interview I did with her in 2003. She had played Fuji the previous two years, and at least one of those years she played multiple shows. This summer will be her first time at the festival since then and she's something of a natural in such a setting. A genuine child of both the 50s and the 60s, Smith understands how pop music and specifically rock music is meaningless without a context, which is why she considers all her songs to have a political dimension. When she played a free-form set at the Field of Heaven, augmented by her poetry, she made use of the natural setting, pulling the trees and the mountains into the lyrics. (She did the same thing once on the Green Stage but made the somewhat forgivable mistake of referring to the mountain in front of her as "Fuji") This quality also makes her act the kind of thing that jam band aficionados miss at their own peril. Once she gets going, she's pretty unstoppable.

But another reason her rock'n roll connects so well is that, as she pointed out above, she likes people a whole lot and isn't happy unless she's interacting with them, either on stage or off. I remember hearing a story that at one of the Fuji shows she confronted a black security guard who apparently objected to her song "Rock and Roll Nigger," and engaged him in a sincere conversation about her reasons for writing the piece. I'm not sure if she won the guy over, but she went out of her way because that's what her music is all about. In that regard, she's a true friend of Fuji.

-Phil

12:37 PM

Röyksopp aren’t the most prolific of European electronic groups; they happen to be releasing two albums this year, but they are only the third and fourth since their formation in 1998, and they don’t release a lot of rare and special edition EPs and singles in between like many of their peers. It’s been four years since their last album, The Understanding, and it was four years before that for their first, Melody A.M.

Junior, out in March, is the more upbeat ‘spring’ record, while Senior will be released later this year as the downtempo ‘autumn’ record. No doubt we’ll be hearing plenty of both at the Festival this year. Junior is not at all a drastic shift in their sound; it hews pretty close to their previous two as exceptionally catchy dance (mostly) music with amazing sound. They’ve always felt darker and consequently more intellectual than, say, Basement Jaxx (also at the Fest this year, by the way—a nice one two punch if you ask me, as two of the best purveyors of pop electronic music that still keep their cool-kid cred), but much more danceable than so-called IDM, and never venture into the sometimes sonically unpleasant experimentation of that genre. They continue to be dependably very good, and I’m thinking hearing them in action should be pretty fantastic.
Röyksopp on Myspace

-kern

11:37 PM

Ida Maria Sivertsen moved out of her small hometown in Norway at the age of 16 to try and make it as a rock singer-songwriter in Bergen, but apparently even the country's second biggest city wasn't stimulating enough and she relocated to Stockholm, where the energy level suited her temperament.

Actually, it's difficult to imagine any city containing, much less satisfying, Sivertsen's bustling personality. On "Queen of the World," which may be her statement of purpose from her debut album Fortress 'Round My Heart, the singer comments on her creative restlessness. "I bump into things," she sings happily in front of a double-time rhythm. "Oh God, why can't I stay like this?" She often invokes the Creator in her songs, which is unusual for a punk-leaning singer though not necessarily for one who grew up in Scandinavia. But God can be pretty human in her songs. On "Stella," He promises to give the titular prostitute "the world" if all she'll do is "hold me tight." Sivertsen doesn't elaborate on why He is particularly interested in this woman. It's enough that He is. Her songs are about the largeness of emotions, and whatever meaning one infers from her songs comes mainly from the way she inserts a hearty chuckle into a chorus or exaggerates the cigarette-coarsened huskiness of her voice.

Ridiculously generous with hooks, Fortress exemplifies the idea of pop as sudden inspiration, and the simple production takes full advantage of her spontaneity to the point where the band's rough edges are left unplaned. If her giddiness can sometimes get grating and her ballads too lyrically protracted, she manages to avoid repeating herself. With a certain kind of management she could conceivably be a pop star on the scale of Avril Lavigne, but it's hard to imagine Ida Maria sitting still long enough for any manager to take her measure, even God.

-Phil

5:03 PM

Another round of artists appearing at this year's Fuji Rock Festival released.

THE AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT
BOOKER T.
BURAKA SOM SISTEMA
COOL WISE MEN
EBONY BONES!
髭（HiGE）
IDA MARIA
MAXIMO PARK
Rafven
THE SHOES
Steve Nieve Band featuring Joe Sumner
UA

Jeff

4:34 PM

The Killers, Oasis, Public Enemy, and Peaches are among the lineup announced in the second wave of artists added to Fuji Rock Festival 2009.

THE KILLERS
9mm Parabellum Bullet
OASIS
PEACHES
PRISCILLA AHN
PUBLIC ENEMY
TORTOISE
SAKEROCK

Full list after jump...

clammbon
DISCO BISCUITS
80kidz
Eli “Paperboy” Reed & The True Loves
ハナレグミ
THE INSPECTOR CLUZO
JUANA MOLINA
THE KILLERS
筋肉少女帯
9mm Parabellum Bullet
OASIS
PEACHES
PRISCILLA AHN
PUBLIC ENEMY
SAKEROCK
SEUN KUTI & EGYPT 80
TheSkaFlames
SONNY J
TOKYO SKA PARADISE ORCHESTRA
TORTOISE
ZAZEN BOYS

Jeff

4:20 PM