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Ninja Academy - Donkey Punch’s farewell

July 5th, 2007
Ninja Academy

The core of Los Angeles based ass-kick rockers Ninja Academy are Indo-Ninja and Outdo-Ninja, who play bass and drums, respectively. As you might expect, a Ninja Academy show is no normal rock show -- Indo and Outdo perform decked out in ninja garb, and are frequently accompanied by guest musicians and until recently, a martial artist by the name of Donkey Punch.

Donkey Punch's final show with Ninja Academy at Los Angeles club The Echo was recorded by Spaceland Productions and is now available for purchase here on Amie Street. Here's some video taken at the show, which should give you a good idea what you're in for:


Play Button The Hunt For the Manipurans ()

Drowning In Culture has a great piece about Ninja Academy and what it's like to see them live. Here's an excerpt:

...in terms of genre labels, they could be thrashy post-rock with a heavy doses of prog and jazz-rock fusion. Their music is churning, idful and unpretentious enough that it's very much rock 'n' roll as well. They can create maelstroms of distorted noise and feedback, thrashing and pummeling their instruments to make more than a match for arty noise artists, but only when a tune calls for it. They also have prodigious chops to match any wanky air-guitar-inspiring hard rock hero but they're not wanky -- no extended prima donna solos, thank you. Even if they don't play their version of "Blue Rondo a la Turk" ("Blue Rondo a la Ninja," of course), it's obvious that they have jazz backgrounds. Indo's chord voicings and Outdo's deft touch with polyrhythms are dead giveaways. But then they also often wrap their tunes in soft-loud-soft/verse-chorus-verse pop song forms with pop chord progressions, keeping things accessible, packaging it all into bursts of riffage and hooks, riding that happy medium between predictability and surprise. It adds a bit of the Pixies to the equation of Lightning Bolt plus Tortoise plus Mogwai plus Weather Report. Their vocals are limited to some triggered samples and an occasional exclamatory remark by Indo to punctuate a tune ("Excuse me!? Your kung-fu sucks!"). Finally, they dress like ninjas -- how could they not?

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3 Responses to “Ninja Academy - Donkey Punch’s farewell”

  1. Velmont Says:

    I heard this when it was put up. I thought it was really cool, but didn´t download because it was a live-CD. (And I didn´t listen to all of it, haven´t got time for that ;-) ).

    But since it was featured I took another listen and figured out it was stupid of me not to buy it just because it was live. :)

  2. Vorkronor Says:

    Interesting music indeed. Got the album as too, but it looks like the first track can’t be extracted from the archive on my windows machine as the file is called (does not even show up in the default windows archive handler):

    01-__Bang_Bang_(My_Baby_Shot_Me_Down)____[Sonn.mp3

    and windows really doesn’t like the lower-than and greater-than characters in filenames.

  3. treetops Says:

    Velmont - this album comes from Kufala Recordings, an awesome indie label that specializes in live albums. I think this one is particularly well executed.

    Vorkronor - sorry about that. I think the problem should be fixed!

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