Prototokyo

Have you ever smelled love?

Smells like wet metal on a bed of honey. Smells like sex in a zipped-up tent. Smells like chocolate.

What does love sound like? Sounds like Prototokyo.

When I first heard these bards – over at some optimistic sake-hop in Okinawa G – I thought: “I guess music don’t ever end.” Their sound is unique, tender, flirtatious. It’s the ultimate soul-mash-up and get this: It comes from the future. Yes, that’s right. Prototokyo’s from a time period when then is now. A time after time. And thanks to a little thing called intervallic collapse, they’ve brought the party to their all-time favorite year: 2005.

Take a good whiff, my distant friends, and say hello to the Love Regime.

-- John Coltrane XI
“Reboot Orchestra,” 2222
- 2222 liner notes

We were just recently interviewed by this amazing Japanese music rag.

Check our photos page for pictures of this review and the front cover of "Loud"! - Loud Magazine (Japan)

I went to the Good Hurt night club one Friday recently and was pleasantly surprised that my sensitive eardrums weren’t shattered and my keen nose not ruined by that sickening odor of booze that sometimes jumps out at me as I pass by the open door of a tavern or a bar or whatever you want to call it.

I actually spent a pleasant time curled up on a leatherette couch in a large darkened and well-ventilated room gently illuminated by all kinds of flashing lights and listening to a bunch of young musicians who called themselves “Prototokyo” and said they were from the year 2222. They danced around like marionettes but at least they were all in synch so I know they had spent a lot of time practicing their moves instead of going around shooting other folks or stealing cars, as some young people do for kicks, I am told.

These young men and women kept urging the crowd to move in closer, so they did, to stand around grinning and calling out with delight when “Prototokyo” did anything to amuse and delight them. There were a lot of smiling faces attached to the people in the crowd. I really felt as though I were at a big party instead of in some sleazy nightclub, and I thumped my tail in time to the music.

The reason that the drums of my long and beautiful ears weren’t shattered was that the club’s “sound system,” as it is called, was quite loud but was also a very fine one, with not much treble and no harshness.

I was surprised to notice some older men nursing bottles of beer and nodding their bald heads in time to the, I must say, very rhythmic and bouncy music. The women with them weren’t bald but were, I think, just about the same age. So much for my stereotyped notion of the Good Hurt clientele before I visited the place.

Of course, most of the visitors were young, and very fine young people they looked like, too.

I then sniffed my way around the block and couldn’t find that the club had much effect on any of the darkened and sleeping neighborhood. Certainly there was no noise except a little bit right in front of the club, on Venice Blvd.

But then, I am only an invisible bloodhound, and I was only at Club Good Hurt for little more than an hour, so what do I know?
- The Westmar Sun