Taiko

The opening theme to this episode was King Edward by Mr. Smith, a Creative Commons by Attribution song distributed through the Free Music Archive.

This episode also features the songs Dark Cyberpunk Action by Energy Sound, Suspensed Tension by Subclair, The Longing For by Simon Legrec, Acidcore by Jumping Bunny, Taiko and Braum Scene by MonkReadySounds, as well as Cyberpunk, Chase, Suspense Dark, and Tyro by Nikita Kondrashev, all from Pixabay and used in accordance with their license.

This episode featured the voice of Nola Dorren-Rideout as the assassin.

And speaking

[laughs]

But this joy of hearing it with taiko drums-

Oh

... and, like, 75 people having the time of their life, I think it must have been legally mandated that everybody had to grin in this video because it is just so much fun.

Which is, first of all, doing a show about swing and having a big band.

W- big is actually literally in the title of it.

You have multiple instruments, all sorts of people on stage, and then you're pairing that with taiko drums.

And if folks aren't familiar with taiko drums-

We should do that." So when you listen to the Oh-en Don, next time Ohtani comes up for Samurai Japan, listen and think, "If I was to take American marching band music and interpret it through a Eastern Japanese lens, how would it sound?" And it [chuckles] is probably what you're gonna hear.

Taiko drums and horns and, and the chants.

And so you even see the, the, um, st- like the, the, the experience itself is interpreted from the American version and changed.

And obviously the, the players are, are on the whole smaller.

But honestly, at the time, I wasn't care, because I was not interested in Buddhism very much by then.

But after I came to Minnesota, about five years later, I encountered a taiko drumming group.

It's called the Kogen Taiko.

And then I caught my attention, because the name of the taiko group, Kogen, it struck me because the word came from sutra chanting.

which is my tradition.

So somebody told me that, yeah, that Taiko group related to some Buddhist group, but they didn't tell me.

They had no idea what kind of sect or anything.

But that the name of the Kogen Taiko, and I was like, oh, Kogen, I know the word.