RFI: Yellow Magic Orchestra

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

You know, I heard an phone interview on Resonance last week with Akiko Yano (interspersed with some of her music), it was a show called Clear Spot. Maybe you could speak directly to Jun herself? If she speaks Eigo of course.

emily - have you read this?
http://www.groundzeromongkok.com/2010/12/memory-and-gender-in-music-of-jun.html

oops, XP

Frogs, yeah, it's a good piece (and I love the toilet ad it links to), but I want more! I guess really I want something book-length, with a really good biographical content as well as analysis.

basically, a book version of this would be the most amazing thing:
http://park10.wakwak.com/~techno/jgenealogy.html

and yeah, togawa is really fascinating. would read all of these imaginary books.

Wow - I need to hear that Akiko Yano Resonance show.

CJV - I imagine it'll turn up in the Resonance 104 Soundcloud page if you check there in the next few days.

found it!
http://www.mixcloud.com/alberto-umbridge/akiko-yano-broadcast-on-resonancefm-25th-march2013/

Japan is such a small country

It is?

Not in terms of population, but in size - like in the US, in the 70's you had the Detroit scene, and the New York scene, and the Nashville scene, and the Chicago sound...in Japan it kinda feels like everybody knew each other and played on each others' records.

Of course theres no book about any of this so I'm just guessing here. Didn't Takahashi and Hosono produce or otherwise appear on all the YEN records stuff, which made up a large portion of Japan's new wave scene?

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8sc3sC5F91qz9lsso1_500.jpg
(sakamoto being cool)

http://chinmai.net/~ichiyanagi/img/060403/ymo.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YjYEJ9WHt4

awesome!

(cuts off halfway through, but you get the idea)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkPeDQKRpEk

The syndrum break in that BBC version is proper!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GncUycY9N34&list=PL2D3C508F366E5AD3&index=3

Confession, I have gone since about 1998 thinking that the record is called 'X∞Multiples' but it's *not* it is 'X∞Multiplies' what the fuck? I have a tour poster and everything, I feel so stupid.

For your ignorance you must relinquish your tour poster to me!

i thought it was "multiples" too until recently

I have owned two copies of this album for about a decade and also thought it was 'X∞Multiples' until 5 minutes ago so you are not alone

xp

Thankful, seriously!

It's like finding out that Dark Side Of The Moon is actually called Dark Slide Of The Moon or something.

Brimstead, I just had a look on Ebay because some guy was selling the same poster there for quite a while and they weren't expensive, but not at the minute unfortunately.

one joy of "multiplies" is that i can (mostly) understand the japanese sketches and they're fucking hilarious

It's their Neu2

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?