San Francisco can finally prepare to float away with the pajama pop stylings of Japan's Lullatone live in concert. The duo will bring their soft breed of electro-pop to the stage at the Space Gallery on Sunday July 29th with local legend Megamoog.
In this rare concert outside of Asia, San Fancisco's audience can experience first-hand one of the events for which these "sensational slumber party music makers" have become famous on the other side of the world. Using a tiny toy orchestra behind whispery vocals, the duo's live sets are known to envelope the audience in a kind of naivety and simplicity most of them thought they gave up around age seven.
Indie music taste makers pitchforkmedia recently commented on the band "Lullatone redraw the possibilities of cute music using toy instruments, ultra-detailed homemade production, and child-like imagination as their brightly colored construction paper."
For Lullatone, music is play. And when they play concerts, they try to let the audience in on as much of the fun as possible.
"We like to get the audience involved as much as we can," beamed Yoshimi Tomida, Lullatone's singer. "Sometimes we sample the audiences handclaps into our toy keyboard and use them in the next song."
"Or we give random people tuned recorders," added American ex-pat Shawn James Seymour, Lullatone's melody maker. "The holes are already taped up to make the right note when they are blown, so the audience can easily play when we give them a color-coded cue."
The duo's own story is also almost as cute as their music. Yoshimi studied in America for a year in college. She met Shawn there, and they started dating immediately. When Yoshimi had to go back to Japan Shawn moved with her. Inspired by living his move there and living in a tiny apartment with only one toy keyboard, he started writing lullabies for Yoshimi nightly, after she dozed off. Those tracks were collected and released to international acclaim by the Audio Dregs label from America. Soon after Seymour recruited Yoshimi into more of the song writing process, adding her adorable vocals to more and more tracks.
Though the duo's tracks these days aren't lullabies proper, there is still a sense of that early inspiration in their new concept pop. They have many names for it, such as "bedtime bossa nova" "sleepytime samba" and "pillow pop music with a bedtime beat" and just as many slogans too.
"Minimalism is cute." "Let's float away." "We will we will rock you (to sleep)."
If floating away or being rocked (to sleep) sounds like something you might be into don't miss this rare chance to see Lulatone live in San Francisco. The Space Gallery is located at 1141 Polk St and the show will start at 7 pm.
Cost: donations