For many visiting musicians, a Japanese tour consists of a brief, meticulously coordinated onslaught of gigs, interviews and in-store appearances, possibly capped by a karaoke session with the record label's PR team. Few get to spend six weeks schlepping around the country on an old city bus, as Egyptology's Olivier Lamm and Stephane Laporte did in 2005.
"We played everywhere in Japan, from Tokyo to some really weird remote towns like Beppu, or some island called Awaji-shima," says Lamm, talking via Skype from his home in Paris. "It was half regular gigs, half playing electronic music in the streets . . . making noise with the sound of the street in real time, with computers."
Back then, he and Laporte were still pursuing separate careers as solo electronica artists, but when they return to Japan this month, they'll be performing together for a change. After years of sharing tour buses and releasing albums on the same record label, the pair began to collaborate in earnest in 2009, pooling their collections of vintage synthesizers to create cosmic, retro-futurist instrumentals under the name Egyptology.