Michael Bjorn, Strange Days, Japan – January 2014

A slightly unusual twist on the Japanese interviews here.

Normally I have a fairly laborious translation process starting with using OCR on magazine cuttings, then painstakingly correcting them manually, then using a mixture of automatic translation, subject matter knowledge, and online human translators.

So this was the way I started with this one. But in doing this I was interested to find that the interview had been done by “Michael Bjorn” and then translated into Japanese.

So I tracked Michael down to find out if he had the interview in the pre-translation English version. He did, and by a fortunate chance he was just on the point of checking copyright with the editor of Strange Days to put it on the music blog he runs with Kjell Haglund (responsible for the 1997 Pop interview already on the site). It also turns out that he looks at this site from time to time.

So I’m delighted to link to the interview – which is a good one and has a very interesting section on Paddy’s early forays into electronic music.

And it’s really nice not to have to do the spadework on the translation for once.

One thought

  1. For gosh sakes! This is wonderful. I expect to be on Popgruppen quite a bit over the next few days. Interviewing Paddy is already a huge clue to what they may like, and just taking a moment on their blog it is clear that they write about very good pop. And of all of the different kinds of music blogs and their approach to embedding streams, literal file or links – the type with dodgy zippyshare-type zips, the type with just embedded youtube, the type with spotify or itunes crud, the type with assorted inline stream players like here, I find it very hospitable and positive that Popgruppen uses a lot of Bandcamp embeds and write about a lot of music in the Bandcamp tier or ethos, if there is such a thing. It’s where I buy music the most. I don’t think I’ve seen Bandcamp’s player around very much, though I may just not know where to look.

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