 If
you're here, you probably don't need an introduction to Yellow Magic
Orchestra: widely considered to be the single most influential Japanese
band of all time, YMO has iconic status to the point that, unlike most
Japanese artists, they're an established part of the worldwide musical
landscape. They were one of the first, and arguably the most
successful, band from Japan to break out into the international scene:
that said, outside of the membership of Ryuichi Sakamoto,
even some music geeks can't tell you much about them. Popular as they
are, it's not widely realized that they started as a supergroup of
sorts, comprised of two already enormously successful musicians (Haroumi Hosono, previously of Happy End and Apryl Fool as well as a successful solo career, and Yukihiro Takahashi of The Sadistic Mika Band.) Ironically, Sakamoto was the relative unknown, his resume at that point being limited to session work and production.
It takes a bit of history to put their debut album into its proper
context. Hosono had been making nostalgia based (but nonetheless
experimental) albums on his own and with his band Tin Pan Alley,
covering songs like "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and showing a general
obsession with all things retro (which, in the early 70s, was still a
pretty out there idea.) Hosono hired Takahashi and Sakamoto to play on
"Paraiso," one of his exotica based albums, and from that session, had
the idea of making a kind of electronic future retro music, changing
the name to Yellow Magic Orchestra.
This is an important point, since filing them under "Technopop," while
ultimately accurate, fails to highlight the essential element of
nostalgia of their debut. After a quick, noisy opener, the band's first
album introduces itself to the world with Martin Denny's "Firecracker." Unlike Kraftwerk (whom they've been compared to ad nauseaum,)
YMO here was about marrying the past and future, creating a cool, neon
world that pulls off the neat trick of belonging to two separate
subgenres: the tropical chintz of exotica, and the not-quite-novelty
peppiness of early electronic music. Robotic as the beats may be, the
albums works best as a mood piece, a soundtrack for imagining a dapper,
glowing world not entirely unlike Terry Gilliam's film Brazil.
Nowhere is this aesthetic more pronounced than "Simoom,"
where the supper club atmosphere is pushed over the top by Takahashi's
suave, heavily manipulated vocals. It's like being serenaded by a robot
in the ballroom of a luxury hotel in the 30s, with tinkling pianos and
vocoders in equal measure. "Cosmic Surfin'" is just that, surf music as
reimagined through circuitry. "東風"
(aka "Tong Poo") is a perfect melding of these two disparate
approaches, taking a disco progression and adorning it with a grand
piano that sounds like it should have a candelabra on top of it.
After this one off studio project took off like a rocket, YMO got an
international deal, put their respective solo careers on hold, and
moved away from their initial nostalgic roots to make "Solid State
Survivor," quickly becoming worldwide ambassadors for both electronic
music and Japanese rock in general. Later albums may be more definitive
in what the band was ultimately about, but their debut should not be
filed away as simply an early curiosity. "Simoom," "Firecracker," and
"Tong Poo" are key tracks in the group's discography. It's also
excellent headphone music, with numerous tiny details hiding in the
corners of the mix. Well worth tracking down.
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Available at Amazon USA.
The album was remixed somewhat and released with a different cover in the US:
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