The one highlight was a film about Japan's ridiculous and totally forgotten Expo '70 - an enormous architectural design festival that was one-part North Korean mass-art and one-part Laugh-In.

*Splutter*! Expo 70 is an iconic utopian exhibition that is by no means forgotten! It marks a giant stride in Japan's image of itself, its national self-confidence. I've made a pilgrimage to the exhibition site in Osaka, with its massive Taro Okamoto sculpture, and I even sang about the Expo in a track I recorded with Kreidler, 'Mnemorex'.

I'm actually all in favour of both North Korean mass art and Laugh In, though, so I'm not going to read your comment as dismissive. I also thought the Archilab show was terrific. How anyone could watch those films of inflatable architecture, with their amazing experimental synth scores, and remained unmoved... well, perhaps Rudy Giuliani could...

Funny, I was looking at an excellent cite documenting the world exposition of the 20th century, Expo'67:

http://naid.sppsr.ucla.edu/expo67/map-docs/expo67-mainmap.htm

Check the groovy Japanese pavillion at Expo'67.

http://naid.sppsr.ucla.edu/expo67/map-docs/japan.htm

I think I've seen that film of the closing ceremony at Expo'70 at an exhibition on the Gutai movement in Kobe about a year ago and I agree it's pretty cheesy. By that time, Gutai was considered to be well past their peak. It's the cultural jidai in which the film Matango was made.

http://www.tohokingdom.com/web_pages/reviews/matango_movie.htm

I love that Expo '70 aesthetic. By no means am I being dismissive.

I didn't like that exhibition outside of the video segments.

It marks a giant stride in Japan's image of itself, its national self-confidence.

Sure, but it's hard to come by books on it that aren't from the 70s.

I think I've seen that film of the closing ceremony at Expo'70 at an exhibition on the Gutai movement in Kobe about a year ago and I agree it's pretty cheesy.

Cheesy but awesome.

Sure, but it's hard to come by books on it that aren't from the 70s.

That's because banpaku was in Osaka. Everybody knows that everything of significance in Japan happens in Tokyo.

As for books, I just picked up "Instant future" last year (ISBN4-7572-0715-8). It's one of those "Street Design File Series" books (published in 2000)

I find that EXPO 70 surpassed other expos in use of rounded plastic and bright solid colors so it typified a particularily yesterday's vision of the future. You can see it's imagery recycled in the Eco-Sci-Fi film "Silent Running" and Minimoni's cafe HQ in their hour long bluescreen adventure film.

It's where someone handed Isao Tomita a copy of "Switched on Bach" and Tarkovsky wanted to shoot exteriors for "Solaris" but got there too late.
umm... and I got a hold of some Super 8 souvenir films and did my own Expo 70 themed mini-concert last December in NYC.

Expos 70 supposedly had both Sergio Mendes and Stockhausen perform. Groovy.

yes, here is some info on the stockhausen performance.

For the 1970 World Expo in Osaka in 1970, Germany built the world's first, and so far only, spherical concert hall. It was based on artistic concepts by Karlheinz Stockhausen and an audio-technical concept from the Electronic Studio at the Technical University in Berlin. The audience sat on a sound-permeable grid just below the centre of the sphere, 50 groups of loudspeakers arranged all around reproduced, fully in three dimensions, electro-acoustic sound compositions that had been specially commissioned or adapted for this unique space.

read more here
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/stockhausen-im-kugelauditorium/

also worth comparing is the 1958 brussels world fair xenakis/le corbusier team-up, which was also pretty cool, since they were playing stuff by Edgard Varèse.

These photographs taken from a 1958 issue of Philips Technical Review depict the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Located in a small site next to the Dutch section and away from the center of the fair, the pavilion hosted a futuristic multimedia display featuring images, colored lighting and music and sounds called the "Poème Electronique." Some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century were involved in its creation, including the architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and the composer Edgard Varèse (1883-1965). But most importantly, the Philips Pavilion represented an important artistic phenomenon through its synthesis of architecture, visual media and music.

more here

http://www.lib.umd.edu/ARCH/honr219f/1958brus.html

It's worth noting that the Phillips Pavilion in 1958 more closely resembles Xenakis' graphic notated music scores than LeCorbusier's oevre. Also worth noting that Varese was more or less at odds with prevailing academic attitudes of the time. Having well established himself as one of the most notable voices in the Avant Garde by the 1930s, his very deliberate approach of often working for extremely lengthy periods of time on scores, yet generally creating his electronic works by feel and chance was more than a little at odds with the academic electronic music community of the day (whom I presume also saw him as an old "name" composer called in to make new music). None the less his work for the Pavillion is quite interesting and in many ways more satisfying than contemporary works more heavily based on theory and documented experimentation.

Tomita did the multichannel synphonic pop music for the multimedia show at Expo 70's Toshiba IHI Pavilion

http://sa-ss.hp.infoseek.co.jp/expo70/toshiba-ihi.htm

4 minutes of the music taken from a single is still available on the compilation CD "Tea and Soft Rock" (TOCT-10787), for better or worse the rest of that album is early 70s Neo Folk despite the cool cover. Would have really gone nuts over a whole album of Pavillion music. I know some commercial pavillion music by Akira Ifukube has been reissued and there's quite a bit of curious music from World's Fairs other than "It happened at the World's Fair" with Elvis. Off the top of my head Aaron Copland had music in '39, Attilo Mineo's "Man In Space With Sounds" from '62 and Raymond Scott in '64 and '67

A Japanese friend just e mailed me on the subject of the significance of Osaka Expo 70 (and other Expos), very much contradicting the idea that the show is 'forgotten':

"The Japanese economy is visually recovering now. Do you see it? Nagoya has been very good these years, and especially this year business will be busy there for the AICHI EXPO. The nostalgia towards EXPO, which is called "Banpaku" in Japanese, has been around these years. I don't mean this Banpaku (nobody cares about it) but the Osaka Banpaku in 1970.

http://expo70-web.hp.infoseek.co.jp/mokuji2.html

Apparently it was such a sensational event for Japanese people, especially for young kids, that they still remember, talk, and create hommages. Kureyon Shin-chan (kids' anime) released "Adult Empire Strikes Back" in 2001, which was an excellent story about adults turning into kids since a theme park called "Banpaku Land" opened, where is filled with 70's culture. "21th
Century Boy", is still on-going psycho-thriller comic title, which also features Osaka Banpaku. Glico's popular "Time Slip Glico" series recently released Osaka Banpaku series':

http://www.ezaki-glico.com/release/20050120/

Anyway, I wasn't even born yet in 1970 but I'd describe Osaka Banpaku as the most joyful, hopeful, exciting experience for the kids (who are adults now in position of deciding what kind of products they make). Human had reached the moon. Technologies giving Japanese people hopes to be competitive
enough. In Japan, Infrastructure was still in the process of developing, and people were forgetting about the war. Life was getting better for everybody everyday.

I don't know why I keep writing this so enthusiastically, but when I look back the relevant of Osaka Banpaku for our generation (one later than Banpaku kids) was discount air tickets... The shift was so meaningful for our generation. Now everybody travels abroad and we don't even have to know we are one of the most advanced countries in the world. But kids won't feel the same liberation, the excitement that we had on our first trip to abroad. I want to be a kid now though - to feel the excitement to meet the world of internet!"

These are all interesting comments.

I meant "forgotten" in the sense that unless you are Japanese or a Japan nerd or design/modern music nerd, you've probably never heard of Expo 70.

The '64 Olympics and Expo '70 are generally seen as Japan's two major cultural milestones that said to the world, we're back!

So yeah, "forgotten" was poorly stated, but I don't think the significance of the event carries outside of Japan anymore like the '64 Olympics still does.

Off the top of my head Aaron Copland had music in '39, Attilo Mineo's "Man In Space With Sounds" from '62 and Raymond Scott in '64 and '67

Perhaps less widely known, but fascinating nevertheless, Hugh LeCaine had an interactive electronic music exhibit at Expo '67, where visitors could become the composer. More here:

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/reg/7/millennium/electronic_music/em_lecaine.html

An excerpt:

Anyone who visited the Man and Music Exhibit at Expo 67 and had a chance to "compose" electronic music by pushing various buttons controlling notes, timbre and pitch, operated a simplified version of another LeCaine invention - the Serial Sound Structure Generator. Simply by switching dials, a composer can produce all possible combinations of the chosen qualities; he can listen to the still unwritten music score and test the electronic notes for duration, intensity, tone-color, attack and decay

More to the point, anyone have any idea what the Aichi Expo'05 might have in store for us, electronic music wise?

More to the point, anyone have any idea what the Aichi Expo'05 might have in store for us, electronic music wise?

I think H Jungle with T will be the featured Electronic act.

H Jungle with T? Oh, I heard from Drew that the Soft Pink Truth would be playing the event...