[PREMIERE] Japan Soul: Hey Yah Hey

Music collective Japan Soul - Jason Paul vocals, guitars, bass, programming, David Roznerm percussion, arrangements and guitars, & DaVe Lipp, saxophones, bass, eclectic instruments - seeks to create transcendental music that synthesizes art, questioning the norm and euphoria through popular music. Japan Soul are influenced that range from late-era Roxy music, mid-80s R&B and early 90s dance music, the blend to create an ever evolving unique sound.

Their latest video for "Hey Yah Hey" is serendipitous convergence of artists, technology, & travel schedule. Japan Soul explains how the video and song came to be, "For the video, we commissioned director Christopher Arcella who has done videos for Bridges and Powerlines and Cloud Seeding. It was serendipitous that Christopher would be spending a few months in Paris where he suggested filming. He quickly assembled avant garde hip-hop dancers Ismaera and Kimson, and actress Flaminia Vincenti to perform in the video. The video follows a group of young artists through the streets of Paris. Their whereabouts are continuously monitored by mysterious drones. The group cleverly finds ways to assert their creative identities and foil the spying drones. Although the video plays like an 80s apocalypse scenario the reality it presents is, disturbingly, not fiction."

The video taps into "Hey Yah Hey"'s sound that fuses "contemporary indie pop, art rock, 90s dance music, funk and new wave" with its rebellious spirit and unconventional perspective. "Hey Yah Hey" is lifted from Japan Soul's upcoming LP, titled Plastic Utopia, is an artful protest of the times. "The album is mostly a compendium of my thoughts on these troubled times," says Jason Paul. "The conceptual premise of Plastic Utopia is that we have slipped into an apocalyptic alternate universe caused by a rift in time that began around the year 2000. 911, Iraq, the great recession…it feels like in the 90s we were living at "The End of History" (Fukuyama) on course to avoid all these terrible calamities. Things are no longer as they should be. On Plastic Utopia, Japan Soul gives voice to the artistic resistance of this dystopian world."

Japan Soul are pop with substance.