12. After DinnerAfter Dinner
I went to see Haco, the singer and main member of After Dinner, when she came to Norway in 2006. And she did this set: first she did a sound piece that was a mic on her computer and then she played songs, which was pretty crazy, to just do this kind of noise piece for ten or 15 or 20 minutes and there was a video of it happening and then all of a sudden she played songs. That was pretty incredible. I really love it when people do that, when they think "this is interesting and this is interesting". It’s what I’ve been saying all along, even with Bridge Over Troubled Water. So I went to see Haco and then I bought all the albums she had with her afterwards. I really like the jagged quality. In a way it’s very poppy but it’s also incredibly stubborn and it comes from a very different perspective, I guess. It sounds like the moment when the first Japanese alternative music group fell together and this happened. That’s what it sounds like to me, although that’s probably not true at all. But it also has the best title ever, one of the songs, the one called ‘Cymbals At Dawn’ – that’s my favourite title of all time.
