RFI: Yellow Magic Orchestra

Patrick, will definitely be listening to Naughty Boys more. I found the instrumental version a bit repetitious and grating when I listened last but I was also in a bad mood, so...

'Solid State Survivor' seconded, no contest. Then 'XXO Multiplies'.

Comparing this band with late 70's/early 80's synth pop from other countries; everywhere else, the synth sounds seemed to inevitably lead to concept pop bands focusing on either amped up irony (M's 'Pop Musik') or dehumanized alienation (Ultravox / Numan / Human League, even Moroder etc.) YMO's a bizarrely happy, kitsch party band throwing out references to video games, sleazy lounge music, happy party fun. If it's dehumanizing, they seem very happy about it. Maybe because the same technology in Japan signified unprecedented financial prosperity? I can't know. Seriously, if anyone can knowledgeably fill me in on how YMO was received in their home land, please post to this thread.

Obviously a big part of the group's concept was throwing up a funhouse mirror to the west's asian stereotypes (the Martin Denny cover, the Snakeman Show skits, the unbelievable 'Tighten Up' single: 'We Don't Sightsee, WE DANCE You Understand, Yahdee!'), but they don't seem... angry... they seem happy? Or is it actually intensely focused rage? Or... what? Huh? How?

For perspective, the only other group doing Martin Denny tributes in the late 70's was Throbbing Gristle (certainly coming from an entirely different place).

The last reissue wave was the early 90's, still one decade too soon. Hopefully they'll catch on this time.

I will cop to less familiarity with the later period and shouldn't generalize. Looking forward to checking out the reissues.

my YMO 10 right now

1. Taiso
2. Rydeen
3. Firecracker
4. Tighten up
5. Tighten up (I can do this!)
6. You've got to help yourself
7. Light in darkness
8. Nice Age (perverse!!!!)
9. Day Tripper
10. Absolute Ego Dance

B-2 Unit is indeed an excellent record. I'll have to check out 1000 Knives. I've been tetchy with Sakamoto solo releases as he's rather ...inconsistent. Haruomi Hosono's Monad Box isn't really worth it either.

I have still not ponied up for any Sketch Show releases! *forehead slap*

Ally's mom in the car when Tighten Up came on the stereo: "They sound like they're making fun of japanese people!"

I can gmail/YSI you guys sick Yamantaka eye remixes also!

Solid State Survivor's so outstanding I can't believe I didn't happen upon it earlier, the perfect synthesis of their pop orientalism and mastery of electronic texture -- the "Japanese Kraftwerk" thing really plays here, with "Behind the Mask" (bizarre history notwithstanding) something of an antidote to "The Model" (there's an absolutely hideous YouTube clip of Sakamoto playing this in the 90s that makes me shivver to even think about). "Insomnia," too, with the noirish vocoder melody that appears in the last third.

I'm only digging into BGM now, but Technodelic seems to get seriously short shrift -- the sound develops by leaps and bounds here, with "Taiso" birthing Nick Rhodes perhaps even more than Richard Barbieri ever could. Transitional, but not the worse for it. Shades of the Beatles, which would show up later on with "Lotus Love."

With Service and Naughty Boys, the music becomes extremely...digital, more symphonic. Some great stuff -- "Limbo," "Wild Ambitions" (featuring Bill Nelson's eBow pretty prominently), "Kai-Koh." These records almost sound like a different band, featuring little of the wit or bounce that kind of defines early YMO songs like "Absolute Ego Dance" and "Firecracker," with much more of an opaque Ippu-Do thing going on.

Still digging in, but with such a diverse profile, it's hard to believe these guys were left with such a niche reputation.

It's great! "Epilogue" should reduce many a grown man to sobbing.

with "Taiso" birthing Nick Rhodes perhaps even more than Richard Barbieri ever could

Clearly I meant "Light in Darkness" here.

can someone recommend some other Haruomi Hosono projects aside from YMO (solo or otherwise)?

Haruomi Hosono

Paraiso is really good. Tropical music with a bizarre electronic twist. Very odd and affecting, and quite catchy as well.
Cochin Moon is an early electronic classic. Really neat stuff.
His Nokto de la Galaskia Fervojo soundtrack is chilling, it's minimal (as is a lot of Hosono's stuff) but very cold and moving. Love it.

so glad this was revived. just found a mediafire folder with all the albums and needed some guidance.

really loving these stripped down live versions YMO have been playing this year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NTnIJ61z1w

Love the synth trumpet!

Whoah, YMO doing "Thank You For Talkin' to Me Africa"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWPbDsPYxZM&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEZ3VxGWwjM

excellent video (if you can ignore the camera effects). kinda weird to see a shorthaired 70's Hosono funking out by himself. they really did keep it tight though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0adjDQyYSI4

amazing find

i think cindy crawford is in one of those!!

hah, she is! I caught her posing dramatically with a piano while randomly skipping around.

Somebody really needs to write me a good, thorough examination on YMO and the Japanese New Wave (400 pages at least). I like the process of rooting around and finding out little bits and pieces of information but I need some cultural CONTEXT dammit!

I'm thinking that Nick Kent (the guy who runs technopop.info) could probably do something like that. YMO are interesting enough to warrant their own book but Japan is such a small country that all that stuff really ran into each other at some point. Like there's 3 degrees of seperation between pretty much every one of those bands. Most of it is probably through Harry Hosono, who seemingly appeared on everything that came out of Japan from 1976 to 1990 or so.

Too true, Hosono is a walking infographic.

a book like that would leapfrogbs to the very top of my reading list, for real

it's weird how popular ymo seem to be when reading about them, but every time i've asked a native japanese if they've heard of them, they haven't. maybe it's a generational thing?

I've experienced this a couple of times with some Japanese aged under thirty or so, although they seem to know Sakamoto for some reason.

What's interesting is that if they are aware of YMO they're often interested that a westerner would be bothered listening to 'old' Japanese music, or even Japanese music period.

yeah it seems like japanese don't have the same retromania that americans do, but i have no idea really

Somebody really needs to write me a good, thorough examination on YMO and the Japanese New Wave (400 pages at least). I like the process of rooting around and finding out little bits and pieces of information but I need some cultural CONTEXT dammit!

― Late night with Amazing Bo (MaresNest), Monday, April 1, 2013 5:42 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've not felt the urge to write about music much over the last few years, but I *really really* want to write a longform piece on Jun Togawa. Never going to happen without a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese, though.

If you want to blow the mind of a 40+ Japanese person, tell 'em you love Ippu-Do or Guernica.

I know a lot of big music nerds who have no idea who Kraftwerk are, for instance...some people just don't really care about anything older than they are

I love that I still have Technodon and the Sketch Show records waiting for me (and countless solo albums, productions, etc). I've been listening to almost nothing but Hosono/YMO since September 2023 and there's still so much just to hear for the first time, let alone reconsider/re-evaluate.

There's another DVD/CD release from Lyon that I'm guessing came out around the same time as the London Meltdown gig, not sure if the set lists differ much, or the lineup even.

Three years later they were doing a more straight ahead (for them) YMO set some of which is on YT and you can probably still buy somewhere - https://www.discogs.com/release/8467134-Yellow-Magic-Orchestra-Live-In-San-Francisco-2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp2P_zNG1A

Yet another for the "great live versions of Gradated Gray" folder. Hosono/Takahashi harmonies are the best. Incredible YT drumming.

I'm sure you'll like the Sketch Show stuff, they play a lot of it in those live shows so you probably know some of the tracks. I was surprised how well those albums held up actually, I kinda thought that glitchtronica pop sound was something that you could always tie back to the early 00s but it still sounds amazing

Technodon is an album I really didn't care for when I first heard it, it makes way more sense in context of their 90s solo albums though. like don't compare it to the other YMO albums, compare it to say Medicine Compilation. you could tell their styles weren't really jiving at this time but it actually sounds pretty great, I mean for me the big revelation was simply hearing it on a nice system where the bass really came through

also I kid you not the reason why I listen to Technodon so often is because the place I work loves to give out these mint chocolates called "Frango" which always makes me think "Pocketful of Frangos"

actually there are a few good advertising jingles in there. Be a Subaru Man

y'all are making me feel like I should give HASYMO another go. I don't mind that sound and I always found the recordings to be fine but... I can't imagine ever wanting to listen to HASYMO instead of regs YMO versions of any of those songs either. maybe this is the year it clicks tho!

I missed Original BGM's post back in May. Did you try? Did it work?

I honestly haven't been able to make it past the first two tracks of that London '08 live album yet. I just keep getting stuck putting You've Gotta Help Yourself and Sports Men on repeat. Too beautiful. I love how Takahashi's voice aged.

Also, Original BGM, OTM for repping Sakamoto's soundtrack to Wings of Honneamise years ago (other thread, but It's All One Thread). My mp3 player's touch-screen broke and for a few weeks the only album I could listen to outside was Wings of Honneamise. Magnificent stuff. Like a more colorful and extroverted younger sibling to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence.

And lastly I'm gonna toot my own horn for a minute, but it's all for the greater glory of KYUN! My Japanese has gotten better and so I made a new translation of Kimi ni Mune Kyun that I think is more accurate and makes more sense than the one on Genius.

https://grainsparrow.blogspot.com/2024/07/translation-my-heart-goes-kyun-for-you.html?m=1

And frogbs, that's amazing about Technodon. I'm inching closer towards it myself... wanted to take your advice and get up to speed with everybody's solo stuff before listening. I'm caught up with Hosono (Medicine Compilation foreverrr) and up to Beauty with Sakamoto now. I love both Neo Geo and Beauty. Just gotta spend some time with Heartbeat (which I know has a killer David Sylvian feat!) and give a few more listens to my frogbs-curated playlist of post-YMO Takahashi, and then I'll finally allow myself to try The Big Don.

really fun to read those translations...I dunno if Japanese love songs are just deeper somehow or if all the strange terms of phrase which don't really translate to anything English speakers regularly say just makes them seem that way.

never heard that soundtrack before...I made an attempt to get into all his soundtrack work a while ago but there's just so much of it!

I mean you'd never hear Air Supply imploring someone to "leap through time" or "meet outside the world"

I'm slightly surprised Heartbeat isn't available on any streaming services, it's great. I've rinsed Sayonara a lot since RS passed. And Cloud #9 is another low-key classic Sylvian/Sakamoto collab.

It's a language with like 100 sounds. There isn't as much of a tendency to rhyme because it can get very samey. So they just get absolutely jiggy with it.

xp

Oh, is that what accounts for how little rhyming there tends to be? I thought it was just Takashi Matsumoto being a trendsetter.

On the other hand, the ridiculous proliferation of near-identical rhymes that verb conjugations create means Japanese rap music sounds soooo smooth. It's like they can't NOT be constantly multi-syllable rhyming.

What are these Sayonara and Cloud #9?! I thought I already had a pretty good grasp on the songs they'd done together. Very pleased to find out that's not the case. Bamboohouses, do you know Grains (Sweet Paulownia Remix)? The latest singing Sylvian has done -- new lyrics written for/about the dying Ryuichi -- set to a remix of what I think was originally a Sakamoto/Alva Noto collab. Amazing piece.

Also, though, Matsumoto (lyricist of Kyun, and also the lyricist in Happy End, back in the day) is awesome at love songs in particular. He likes to draw very particular scenes and evoke very particular emotions... usually from a girl's perspective, no less, since the majority of his lyric-writing was done for "aidoru." Wonderful idiosyncratic stuff. If only the love songs that fill western charts had such careful and ingenious lyrics.

What are these Sayonara and Cloud #9?!

I listened to Heartbeat, and now have answers. Great record. I'm loving this whole "international big-name feats over auteur bedroom-studio pop" period of Sakamoto's career. The albums sound like collages. Futurista is clearly where this whole approach was born -- nobody talks about Futurista! But it's fantastic. And then it's like Neo Geo and Beauty and Heartbeat expand out from that center, sounding more and more polished. But Sakamoto's weirdness is still evident in the whole if not always the parts.

In September of 1981, Hosono, Takahashi, and Sakamoto took the members of Kraftwerk to a Roppongi disco.

And the members of Kraftwerk danced.

We don't sightsee! We dance! You understand?

Heard Technodon for the first time today. The playfulness and sense of drama are 100% YMO.

Frogbs otm in his advice that it's best heard once you're familiar with the solo albums of the early '90s. I can imagine that jumping straight to it from Naughty Boys or Service would feel jarring. But after weeks immersed in Medicine Compilation, Beauty, and Heartbeat, Technodon feels like alchemy. It's the sound of the band melding their legacy with the best of what they were up to at the time.

No wonder it's called Technodon -- song after song (starting with YT's very Pure Jam-esque vocals in the opener) gave me the feeling that it was their express intention to make a follow-up to Technodelic. To the point that I started wondering whether Hosono would do lead vocals on a song in the middle of Side B somewhere...

I wouldn't trade Hosono's 1984-1993 for anything in the world, so I can't say I wish they'd never broken up, but this album really makes me wish it had been the beginning of a YMO Act 2 that lasted right through 2023, and not an anomalous final one-off. It's way more adventurous than Beauty or Heartbeat. It feels like a natural and exciting alternate current for Hosono's creative energy. And YT's vocals sound so great I'm suddenly eager to investigate his own concurrent stuff.

I love Technodon.

I feel the same way about the LondonYMO/GijonYMO live albums from 2008 the same way now; I was at the 2008 London show, only really versed in the canonical YMO albums, and was a bit underwhelmed. But now, listening to those records, having absorbed all the solo projects + Sketch Show + everything else, I hear them as three geniuses meeting each other on the level of where they were in that moment. (Likewise, I also wish we'd got a studio record out of the 2008 glitch/folktronica incarnation of YMO)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUOliMCG5uM

I've only just noticed that Technodon is on streaming services (at least in the UK) for the first time, along with the Technodon Live album, the remix EPs and the singles, none of which I've heard. Looking forward to digging in.

the live album is pretty cool. the Technodon tracks (which make up the bulk of it) have some extra elements and the reworked versions of older tracks are great - its only a few tunes (and nothing later than SSS) but it does make you wonder what an 'updated' version of YMO's best tunes might've sounded like. both Kraftwerk and Telex released albums like that in the 90s but YMO never did.

ultimately I think the issue with a YMO reformation is that Sakamoto just lost all interest in pop music sometime in the 90s. in fact you can pretty much pinpoint exactly when, in 1996 when he released an album called "1996" - Smoochy still has pop elements but very little after that does. maybe like a tune or two on Chasm. I don't think YMO really works without that. the vocals, the actual songs, that's all very important to their sound. and Takahashi was still writing a lot of tunes even if the others weren't. but I don't think Sakamoto had that frame of mind anymore. Hosono wasn't really doing pop either but he still seemed game to work in that context. hence why the Sketch Show albums worked so well. I've prob mentioned this before but Sakamoto getting back into the fold might've prevented that thing from going on. but who knows. none of those guys stuck to anything for very long. kinda what makes it all so special I suppose.

Pocketful of Rainbows: their chillest song?

No kidding about YT keeping himself immersed in song form. He backed away from lyric writing (and why the fuck would he go and do that? he was so good at it) but the tunes are there. And wonderful singing. The arrangements aren't ambitious enough, okay. But I had Mr. YT (his post-Technodon solo record) on repeat for a whole day last week.

boxset of 1978-1979 live performances coming.

https://www.farsidemusic.com/acatalog/YMO-1979-Trans-Atlantic-Tour-Live-Anthology--FSD10175.html

I'm generally not interested in these sets where you get to hear the band do the same songs over and over but it may be pretty good, I've seen the source of this preview video before and it looks and sounds way better here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh0Q90_2BEg

it says they've been upscaled using "the latest technology", can't help but think there is some AI here, I don't mind though, this is what AI is really good at

I was listening to Focus the other day and it struck me how weird an album Naughty Boys is. Yes, Hosono was writing a lot of radio-friendly pop songs for Takashi Matsumoto in those years, and YT had been pop-inclined from the start, but I don't think there's anything in any of the three's careers up to that point that you could point to and say, "See! Here! -- this right here is the germinating seed of Naughty Boys. Clearly they were heading in this direction." -- is there?

I've always thought Naughty Boys sounded like commercial music, and Sakamoto's commercial work dates back to 1982. A lot of the same instruments and synths too. This combined with YT's solo work I think is how you get that sound:

https://www.discogs.com/release/2283320-Ryuichi-Sakamoto-Works-I-CM

I guess it's important to remember that the band actually split in 1982 - Hosono mentions in the liner notes to Philharmony that he didn't want to do solo albums while YMO was active, he only made the album because he was convinced the band was done. What led them to get back together and make such a perfect, sarcastic pop album is probably a story worth telling. I can't imagine they would've done something like that prior to the split.

In that case, enough is enough, I'm finally gonna give that Sakamoto CM comp proper attention!

I've played it a few times through, but not attentively.

That's a great point about Naughty Boys only being possible post-break-up.

I don't know too much about that particular twist of fate; I know they'd patched up their working relationships after BGM and made up their minds to give the next album their all, figuring that, the way their interests and fortunes were drifting apart (Hosono had seduced RS and YT by promising that YMO would be the launching point of their solo careers), it was bound to be the last. And when Technodelic was done, all three were on board with stopping there: "Anyway, we're never going to better that."

It might simply have amounted to the record label being all politely professional in that self-effacing professional Japanese way -- "One more, please. We're counting on you" -- and the three of them being too big sweethearts to refuse? I remember a remarkable lack of angst in their comments about Naughty Boys.

I completely love that CM 1 comp, the melodies are astounding. catchiest song about diapers ever.

Yano sings the diaper one, right?

Just the fact that two musicians as unique and ambitious and as different from each other as Akiko and Ryuichi were collaborating closely for a few years there, is one of those miracles Japanese music history is ludicrously full of.

She does sing that.

they did collaborate on a child as well

Technodelic, then.

This song has absolutely captured my heart:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTrlRXRnzho

Minna genki ~