Consider the Space Pizza. It drifts alone, bearing witness to every transgression down on Earth yet offering no judgement. Its cheese froze at some point in the -50-0°C temperatures of the stratosphere; if the balloon somehow holds up for another 30 kilometers, it’ll reach the first stages of the thermosphere, where it’ll burn to ash and float off into the cosmos. Maybe the certainty of its disintegration clarifies everything for the Space Pizza. With Erik Satie lulling it into its final slumber, it comes to perceive multitudes within itself: youth, growth, hyperbole, geographic loyalty, ambition, friendship. Above all, the Space Pizza embodies the classic, if underrepresented philosophical concept known as “pizza being in space.”
After a series of scene-defining digital releases, short-run tour 7-inches, and the Scott Pilgrim video game OST, New York’s 8-bit shredders Anamanaguchi dropped their new album Endless Fantasy on May 14. The album’s 22 tracks expand the quartet’s NES-derived melodies and pop-punk rawk-band aesthetics into more territory than ever: electro club zones, slow-jam ballads, ambient interludes, anthems to soundtrack a midnight cruise through Neo Tokyo. The video for the album’s title track showcases the kaleidoscopic, culture-colliding audio-visual language the band has developed over years of multimedia omnivorousness.
Subliminal anime interrupts shots of New York’s streets. LED-illuminated nightlife rages on as pizza ascends. We feel the kind of feelings that only emojis can properly convey. The video arrives in the wake of the band’s insanely successful Kickstarter campaign, which allowed them full creative control of the album’s release and its many attendant media. If this is the kind of “weird internet stuff” we can expect from the newly $$$-laden Guch-bros moving forward, Space Pizza is only the beginning.
• Anamanaguchi: http://anamanaguchi.com
More about: Anamanaguchi
