RFI: Yellow Magic Orchestra

'Naughty Boys' might be the greatest synth-pop album ever.

very...weird.

Sakamoto's '1000 Knives' is very close to the YMO sound, more jazz less kitsch though. 'B-2 Unit' and 'Esperanto' I love to tiny bits.

The new Sketch Show record 'Loophole' has disorientingly modern production; it's glitch-o-clock. But it's really growing on me. It's currently a hyper-expensive import, I wouldn't say it's $28 worth of brilliant but if you're a YMO fanatic, you definitely want this. If it ever comes out domestically, people will be talking about it.

I'm unclear on Xoo Multiples...is it just a compilation of the first two, or are the versions of the songs on that one somehow different?

the us edition replaces the skits with several tracks from 'solid state survivor'. hopefully any new reissue will just feature the japanese edition.

early copies of the us edition of 'B-2 Unit' replaced the dissonant 'Participation Mystique' with the amazing 'Warhead', from the a-side of a 12" single. if the song you're thinking about has a one-beat slapback delay on all the human vocals and insane vocoder vocals for the chorus, that's 'Warhead'. they're both incredible songs.

Those are insane and wonderful. Anyone who complains/can't deal with hip-hop skits probably just won't know WHAT to think about these.

And I agree with milton on 'Loophole'. Pretty great album. I was surprised. The one from '02 'Audio Sponge' is good as well (higher highs, lower lows maybe).

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

Today I heard my way into the Simoon bassline. I don't think I'll be able to notice anything else about the song ever again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l79HgXvxP8

^^ hah, just coming to post that. it's from the same guy who did that "what's on the Genesis floppy discs" video which I know some ILXors liked.

Would any Solid State Survivor diehards mind expounding a bit on what you love most about the album? After a very long stint of it being my least favorite YMO album, yesterday I had one of those "scales falling from your eyes" moments. Could hardly believe I was listening to the same album. I'd love to get some cheat sheets as to what to pay attention to, now that I'm finally attuned to what it's doing.

Also, people here have said SSS is the most Kraftwerkian YMO album. I've never knowingly heard a Kraftwerk song. What should I try first? Insomnia is my favorite on SSS, if that helps.

thats a real hard question to answer I mean it's one of the catchiest albums ever made. it plugs directly into that part of your brain that freaks out whenever you hear come on Barbie lets go party

I've never knowingly heard a Kraftwerk song. What should I try first?

what??? I swear I never say things like this but how do you not know Kraftwerk? give 'em a try there's a 50% shot it's your new favorite thing and you're bumping the Kraftwerk thread in a week going "holy shit y'all ever heard Europe Endless" and a 50% shot you're like "nah it's pretty corny but maybe it was cool back it its day". when I discovered them I was the latter but after a while really got into them. anyway Neon Lights is my favorite track by them, the second half especially is some of my favorite music ever, if you want an album I think Computer World will tell you what you need to know. but if you're afraid you'll find them too silly maybe do Man-Machine instead.

computer world is their best album and a total classic

as for SSS the moment at the end of Technopolis where the music slowly fades away but the drums don't is one of the coolest moments in their catalogue. just so you can plainly hear how great YT's drums are on this thing

actually come to think of it that's what really makes this album tick. of all the cool synth stuff being done back then the one that really blows my mind is this. like the fact it was released in the same decade that Pink Floyd and Zeppelin were hitting the charts is still crazy to me. you hear Kraftwerk and yeah it's impressive but it does sound like what you'd expect synth pop in the 70s to sound like. Moroder had more sophisicated rhythms but they were still pretty static. YMO however had Yukihiro Takahashi who *sounds* like a drum machine but is in fact someone who by the way can play all sorts of complicated backwards shuffle patterns with ease. so it sounds so far beyond everything else that was going on at the time.

That figures, one of the thoughts I had yesterday was, "If this album was JUST drums, I think it'd become a favorite on the strength of these drumfills alone."

OTM re: the Barbie comment, though it makes me wonder why Naughty Boys clicked so soon and this didn't.

I always think about that when I listen to the '78 debut -- how in god's name did it occur to Hosono that he should make this kind of all-digital music BUT keep a live drummer?

Which spawned the follow-up thought: is genius actually just the combination of a great idea and the wherewithal/dedication to follow through on it?

I've never knowingly heard a Kraftwerk song. What should I try first?

Kraftwerk released six classic albums between 1974 and 1986* and one of their many remarkable aspects is that each one is completely different in concept and mood to the record that preceded it. Autobahn invented synth-pop and has a very melodic major-key sound, but is also quite Krautrock-y in places. Radio Activity (1975) is much more somber and atmospheric in feel, which of course sometimes exactly what you want.

Trans-Europe Express (1977) kicks off with a lovely pop epic ("Europe Endless") but then works its way through a series of gothic masterpieces. The penultimate track, "Franz Schubert", is hauntingly beautiful and dreamlike; I think it's the most slept-on piece in their whole catalogue. This album marks the point where Kraftwerk acquired their first sequencer, but it's used throughout as a fifth band-member, meaning that there is still a discernible "live" feel in places. By contrast, every track on The Man-Machine (1978) is built up from ultra-precise sequenced rhythm patterns, and the band's drummer essentially became surplus to requirements. This is one of the reasons that The Man-Machine stands in elite company as one of the most influential pop albums ever recorded. That said, conceptual and technical brilliance doesn't count for much if you don't also bring some great tunes to the party, and Kraftwerk delivered on that too. "The Model" was released a single some years later and hit number one in the British charts!

Computer World (1981) doubles down on the interest in danceability that began to appear in its predecessor, and in places radically pares back the band's usual focus on melody and harmony in favour of funky proto-electro drum patterns. That said, it does include their pop songwriting apotheosis, "Computer Love", which is built around their most beautiful and melancholic set of melodies. Kraftwerk are often described as musical visionaries, but what's also fascinating here is that the lyric imagines an electronic match-making service, prefiguring the emergence of Tinder by about three decades. ("I need a rendezvous / Computer love, I call this number / For a data date")

* Electric Café was generally regarded as a disappointment on its release in 1986 and is still derided even by many aficionados. However, while I will admit that it's not wholly on a par with their previous few records, I do really like it. Although Kraftwerk's de facto leader Ralf Hütter subsequently became content for the band to become a heritage act, in the mid-80s he was still very intent on pushing forward musically. To this end, they retired their warm-sounding analogue synthesisers in favour of the most sophisticated (and expensive) digital workstation of the era, the Synclavier. And it had the desired effect, in that Electric Café did sound absolutely state of the art at the time of its release. Although there is a nice, wistful pop song ("The Telephone Call") half-way through, the overall vibe is prescient, angular minimalism. "Boing Boom Tschak" and "Musique Non-Stop" are playful, but also viciously funky. Turn up the volume and the Synclavier's hard-edged drum samples will pummel you into submission.

I always think about that when I listen to the '78 debut -- how in god's name did it occur to Hosono that he should make this kind of all-digital music BUT keep a live drummer?

he plays bass on it too. actually I'm pretty sure there's real bass and drums on all of YMO's albums in varying quantities. but on later albums it's way more of a mix.

how did it occur to him? probably just heard YT play :)

the mood of “rydeen” is particular is very LETS GOOOOOOO!!! what a tune.

So apparently, when they were making BGM, Hosono asked Sakamoto to write a new song in the vein of Thousand Knives. Sakamoto said, "Fuck you. Why don't you just put Thousand Knives on it then?"

Extensive 2020 interview with Hideki Matsutake!

https://www.electricityclub.co.uk/logic-system-interview/

I love that Hosono kept the Infinite Space Octave in mind for THREE YEARS.

Everyone. Single favorite Yellow Magic Orchestra song. Go!

If the Tong Poo > La Femme Chinoise > Bridge Over Troubled Music > Mad Pierrot > Acrobat suite counts as a single song, then that's the one. The debut is not my favorite YMO album but Side B is definitely my favorite album side.

If not, then it's gotta be Gradated Gray -- one of Hosono's most soulful vocal performances (AND one of his best sets of lyrics), plus that insane -- subtle, ghostly -- band arrangement. If Technodelic as an album is the apogee of the three in full-on-collaborative mode, Gradated Gray is the apogee of that collaboration WITHIN the album. The drums in the chorus destroy me (that little kick-snare combo: "every minute..." kick SNARE). And the vocal melody at the end! Mixed quieter than the main vocals, like they're intentionally encouraging you to listen in. "To where... gray meets white. To where..."

Frogbs, is it still your favorite too?

that song definitely connected with me during a long drive - there's that line "my car radio's playing a song, that makes me feel very strange"...like yeah I'm listening to it right now. I agree there's something about how everything lines up in that song that feels a bit strange, it's very precise but feels a bit backwards. it's probably still my favorite, so long as you can't pick an entire album side :)

I also like the Sketch Show arrangement of it. fun to see them actually play it so you get a sense of what the band members are actually doing. the added guitars in the chorus are really something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6JaenTfVnQ

and then, 10 years after, this countrified, sorta jazzy arrangement. amusingly without even watching the video I can tell that's Harry on piano. his playing is not unlike it was on the Monad albums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NjSg54eNSM

I-in my defense, Side B of the debut is seamless! And each song is the exact same tempo! (And as such, the proggiest the band got?)

Gonna check those out soon. I didn't realize the song stayed in live rotation.

Also -- after frogbs called the Technopolis fade-out to my attention, (with everything fading out early, but Takahashi's drums playing on at full volume), I realized that Absolute Ego Dance ends the same way: the other instruments fade first, the drums stay (along with some percussive odds & ends). And then Rydeen is the exact opposite, the drums drop out first, and everything else keeps going for a while -- as if paving way for the (relative) quiet of Castalia.

Side B of the debut is interesting to me since all 3 tunes do clearly go together but they were all written by different members. They never really did anything like that since. I think back then the band was just supposed to be a one-off on a sort of gimmicky concept so they were all going outside of their usual styles and clearly having a lot of fun with it. in YT's solo catalogue you'll hear songs like Nice Age or Ballet or Cue, but not La Femme Chinoise. nothing Hosono did really sounds like Mad Pierrot.

The After Service version of “La Femme Chinoise”

For my OPO

Taiso for me, but it's only a hair ahead of like 20 other songs of equal stature, imho.

The After Service version of “La Femme Chinoise”

Just heard this for the first time. Takahashi's vocals! Goes to show how far five years of constant singing can take you.

And both those Gradated Gray live takes are awesome. The guitar brightens the choruses up, which is pleasantly disorienting. I love how sedate both arrangements stay and how psychedelic both get, in their own ways. Great woozy piano-led outro in the Hosono version.

Taiso could go for fifteen minutes and still wouldn't get boring.

Naughty Boys always ends SO SOON.

There's a much improved translation of Lotus Love over at the blog:

https://grainsparrow.blogspot.com/2024/03/translation-lotus-love-yellow-magic.html

(In addition to stylistic fixes, I made a major error in the version originally in this thread -- misread one kanji, ruining a beautiful line...! Sorry Harry.)

Sports Men isn't the kind of song you'd think would move a man to tears, and yet, here we are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QusyWLaSQf4

2008, huh. Must be one of the all-time "damn shame"s of modern music that the HASYMO-incarnation YMO didn't record a new album.

Frogbs, you ever heard Hen Ogledd? Their album Free Humans is a huge favorite of mine. When I first heard HASYMO's Rescue, I thought, "Whoa! Sounds like the wellspring of Free Humans!" And then when I first heard Underworld's Space, I thought, "Clearly someone in Hen Ogledd loves Underworld." So it might do something for you.

I still feel happy that I caught that concert, I was a little perplexed at the setlist (and to some extent the inclusion of Christian Fennesz in the line up) at the time, but it makes perfect sense now.

haven't heard of them but I'm listening now and it's cute. kind of reminds me of the Ann Steel album actually. pretty long album but it's entertaining me so far :)

I've wondered for a while what a HASYMO album would sound like - the singles were okay but felt kind of stopgap. Tokyo Town Pages is nice but it doesn't hit me the way the stuff on Loophole does. idk, maybe their styles were too far off. Sakamoto in particular was so far away from any kind of pop music at that point. that London concert ruled though. amazing how for a YMO 'reunion' they only played like 3 YMO songs. probably the right decision though.

The first song on the Ann Steel album is killer!

I've got some exploring to do where YMO live is concerned. I feel like I know the studio catalogue inside and out at this point. But I went to look up the setlist of the London 2008 show and found out it has a DOUBLE ALBUM PROFESSIONAL RELEASE, what?! With Fennesz in the band indeed?! I did research into all the live releases back when I was getting started (with frogbs's help over on RYM) but the details didn't mean as much to me then as they of course do now... especially now that I've seen and cried through the back half of that Sports Men... and that was only song TWO of the night.

Also, Philharmony has rocketed up into my favorite albums of all time. It sounded a little thin and scattered for a while, like Hosono had let his usual "Master Overseer Producer" side slide so that he could indulge more freely in the sheer joy of tinkering around with a new synth/computer/toy. But listening to it obsessively this past week has revealed plenty of ingenuity, beauty, and emotion. Amazingly structured too, it turns out.

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)