Countdown Japan!

Halcali will be playing Countdown Japan, a huge festival spanning four days from the 28th to the 31st of December across two locations in Osaka and Tokyo.

Halcali will be performing in the Tokyo half on the 31st.

This festival looks massive, with absolutely everyone from Kimura Kaela to Orange Range to Polysics (one Halcali connection) to Hello Works (another one) to Shonen Knife to Boom Boom Satellites to...well take a look yourself and see. It reads like a who's who of the Japanese rock/pop market.

How good is it to see Halcali alongside those names? Is it too much to hope for a new single before the end of the year to go with it?

Our Music

Halcali are set to make their first non-cable TV appearance in a while on the 2nd of November.

They will appear on Fuji TV's Bokura No Ongaku (Our Music), singing a "band version" of their cover of Okuda Tamio's Ai No Tame Ni (the recorded version of which I wrote about here).

Check out the hosted-by-something-other-than-youtube video here on the 2nd.

Back in the studio with Schadaraparr/new song

Schadaraparr, not seen since the Bacon days (Ah, Halcali Sensation!) got together in a kind of mini collaboration with Halcali recently. According to Yukari, they went to the studio where Schadaraparr were recording material under the name Hello Works, a collaboration of their own with Sly Mongoose (Hello Works video here).

Halcali went along to listen and this quickly turned into them recording vocals for them for a song that, naturally, "we can't talk about!"

No news on a release date for the project, but I personally think that we can never have too many Schadaraparr and Halcali collaborations. And if that doesn't interest you for some reason, keep scrolling down the page to see something else we can never have too much of- pictures of dogs wearing wrestling masks.

So after you've saved that picture as your desktop wallpaper, keep moving down to see a bit of information on a new Halcali song they debuted at their recent Shibuya Boxx gig. The song is called Setsunatsu (an Otsukare Summer type pun on the words setsunai (sad) and natsu (summer)).

A future b-side perhaps?

Update: Patrick writes to let us know that the Hello Works album (presumably featuring the Halcali collaboration) is called Payday and will be out on December 5th. (Here's the news on bounce.com)