Welcome Retronauts listeners who are discovering this blog for the first time thanks to my recent appearance on that show. It was a lot of fun to be back after a long hiatus from it!

I do occasionally post game music here. I’ll probably be sharing some in the coming week or so. A good one too, something extra bizarre, so hold tight on for that. In the meantime, be sure to check out my other site, Mostly-Retro.com. I post a lot more gaming and Japan-related stuff there.

In the meantime, here’s an obscure album of synthesizer covers. Y’know, the hottest latest.

E-Project – Synthesizer Trek
The liner notes on this release don’t have a lot of details regarding who E-Project exactly is. But from digging around on the internet I discovered that E-Project is a duo comprised of Susumu Hirasawa and Takashi Kokubo. At least, that’s what a random website said.

It would certainly make sense though. Hirasawa is an incredibly influential and eclectic musician. He’s best known in Japan for his work with P-Model, an amazing group that did a bit of everything from prog rock to new wave synthpop, but he also has an extensive solo discography that I’ve been meaning to dive into a bit more.

Takashi Kokubo has also been around. He was in a prog rock act called Ring, but I don’t know anything about them. What I do know is that after this album was released in 1980 he started pumping out the amazing Synthesizer Fantasy anime/manga “soundtrack” LPs that I often mention here. He put out 10 of those bad boys in a scant three years. I own half and I can personally attest to how utterly amazing they are. Fucking rad shit even if you don’t give a shit about the anime they originate from (I certainly don’t). He also released a Bach covers album called Digital Bach, which I have, and I’m certain I’ll share here at some point.

Anyways, unlike a lot of the other synthesizer albums I’ve featured here recently, this one is almost entirely focused on newer (at the time) compositions, specifically it focuses on themes and songs from big sci-fi epics. That means you get synthesized covers of the Star Trek and Star Wars themes, as well as all-electronic takes on tunes from Close Encounters, Black Hole and even Alien. The main theme from 2001 is also included, because how couldn’t it be. Also along for the ride is the original track “Intergalactic Journey,” and “Night Flight,” a cover of an obscure song I’ve never heard of.

My favorite number on the album is the batshit interpretation of the Star Trek theme. It incorporates this wacky, weird synthesizer springy effect into the mix. Sounds like noises you’d hear if you came across Q-Bert fucking or something.

Sorry for that mental picture.

Please enjoy. And if you’re interested to find out what synthesizers were used on this album, you’re in luck, they listed them all.

Holy shit.

I’ve been ridiculously productive this past week. I revived Game Music Revue to write about the Famicom Game Sound Musuems, and I wrote a blog post about my struggles with converting analog-to-digital. I can’t believe I’ve been doing that for over ten years now. Does that make me an expert? I don’t feel like an expert.

Here’s a cassette tape. I hate them.

Kamiya- Mu
I hate cassette tapes, did I mention that? So I feel like such a hypocrite whenever I buy one. I was just on a podcast (coming soon) and I literally spent a good five minutes rallying against tapes and their unexpected and inexplicable revival here in Japan, only to then go out and immediately buy one.

It wasn’t my first choice though, if I would’ve seen this one on vinyl I definitely would’ve chosen that format first. I mean, look at that cover. That deserves the full 12″ treatment. (Yikes, that sounded like a euphemism.)

Anyway, I didn’t really know what it was when I bought it. I just saw that cover and assumed it was some crazy newage/synthesizer/jazz/funk thing. And I assumed right. I know that sounds like a stretch, but seriously, it feels like every other Japanese album from 1978-1981 fits in that genre.

This album is a real rollercoaster, swinging across all of those genres with some experimental and dissonant stuff thrown in as well. While it does run the gamut, its certainly more towards the easy listening, smooth newage side of the spectrum. If Kamiya was from the states, this would’ve been released on Windham Hill Records.

My favorite cut on the album is without question “Appalachian Road,” a jaunty jazzy little number with excellent vocoder use and a killer melody that’ll get stuck in your head for days. Peter Frampton by way of Herbie Hancock. “Barbarella” is a choice cut too. I imagine playing this in my space lounge, sipping space martinis with my space boyfriend – who is just my current boyfriend but with a jetpack.

Kamiya’s full name is Shigenori Kamiya and I found out after buying this that I actually have another one of his records. In 1982 he released a “soundtrack” to the manga Tomb Of The Pharoh. It was part of the Synthesizer Fantasy series, a collection of albums that present synthesized versions of popular anime themes, as well as a few original soundtracks inspired by manga. I’ve shared some Synthesizer Fantasy records before, they’re on the shortlist of my favorite things ever. If you ever find yourself shopping for vinyl in Japan and you come across any record with that label on, I suggest buying it. You probably won’t be disappointed.

Alexander Katenin – Alone In The Maze Of Rhythms
I’ve been trying to write about this one for a few weeks now. First I was distracted by the horrible Boom Boom Satellites news and then work. But to be honest, most of the delay in posting this came not from external forces, but simply from the fact that this album is so weird that I’m kind of a loss of words as to what to say about it.

This is Alone In The Maze of Rhythm. It’s a synthesizer covers album. There’s nothing entirely unique or weird about that. There were a ton of these in the wake of Wendy Carlos’ seminal 1968 masterwork Switch-On Bach, “let’s take some classical and pop tunes and play them on Moog” was practically a genre in the early 70s. I have quite a few of them. All Moog Hair? Got it. Wanna hear Gershwin on Moog? How about Handel, Beethoven or even the theme to Flesh Gordon? Guess what, a Moog version of it probably exists.

But Alone In The Maze of Rhythm is unique, and just downright weird, for a few reasons. Firstly, while most Moog covers albums were released in the late-60s to mid-70s, this one came later. It came way later. It came 1986 later.

That’s weird. You see, the Moog covers album craze was mostly born out of the fact that most people had never even heard a synthesizer before, and that their sound was so alien that you could record damn near anything on them and someone would want to hear it, at least once. But by 1986, that just wasn’t true. Synthesizers had won. Shit, not only had the world become accustomed to synthesizers, but they were quickly becoming played out. By 1986, most of the innovation that the synthesizer brought to the pop world had been sullied and watered down to the point of banality. We weren’t getting “Cars” anymore, we were getting “I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight.” Synthpop was on its last legs.

I guess no one told the Soviet Union though, because that’s where Alone In The Maze Of Rhythm comes from.

Yes, from behind the Iron Curtain comes Alexander Katenin, a man who…I know absolutely zilch about. Turns out there isn’t a lot of English information on the web about mid-80s electronic covers albums from the Soviet Union. Everything I know about the guy I dug up on Discogs. He released two albums a solo artist, both synthesizer-focused cover records, and one as a part of a duo by the name of…Гоги И Гия Бешитаишвили.

Yeah, I don’t know how to say that. You’re on your own.

So what we have here is a synthesizer-covers album composed in 1986 in Soviet Russia. And yet, we still haven’t reached the actual weird parts of this record.

One of them is the instrumentation behind the record. Not all synthesizer covers albums used Moog synthesizers, but an overwhelming majority of them did, so much that for some, Moog is shorthand for synthesizer. But there are all kinds of synthesizers out there, and this was especially the case in the 80s, with the rise of digital synthesizers like the Synclavier and the Fairlight CMI, two machines that literally defined the very sound of the 80s.

But Katenin didn’t use those. No. He chose the Farfisa Syntaccordion. That’s an accordion/synthesizer combo unit. Now, I don’t know how much of a synthesizer it really is. No way it has the range or capabilities that you might find in a Moog or Fairlight unit, but it was definitely advertised as a synthesizer, as this ad from Retro Synth Ads proves. And the album certainly has a synthesizer feel to it, far more than than an accordion one to be honest.

And so if you were ever thinking “I hope one day I can hear Frank Stallone’s ‘Far From Over’ performed on a strange accordion/synthesizer hybrid,” well then you’re in luck! Ditto if you were ever hoping to hear Soviet-electronica interpretations of Elton John’s “Your Song,” “Gloria” by Laura Branigan, and the theme to “Flashdance,” among others.

This album has an incredibly strange tracklisting, one that I can’t 100% verify, as the liner notes and record label are just straight-up wrong, with tracks in the wrong order and credited to the wrong songwriters. I did my best to fix them on my MP3s, but a few tracks, specifically “Theme d’Avril,” “In Search Of” and “Cappuccino” could still be wrong. So if you give them a listen and know what their real names/point of origins are, please inform me in the comments.

So it’s a weird record with a weird point-of-origin, a weird instrument of choice and a weird tracklisting, but is it any good? Well, I mean…no? It’s cheesy as hell. The cover of “Just The Way You Are” sounds like it was taken out of a compilation of elevator music. But it does have it’s charm. “Gloria” is a dope track that’s hard to fuck up regardless, and the tracks that I can’t properly identify are legit good. “Theme d’Avril” features an absolutely haunting vocal track that sounds all the more unreal when matched up to the cheesy beats coming out of the syntaccordion. And then there’s “Cappucino” which features a rad proto-acid house grimey bass-line paired up with odd, slightly creepy vocalizing that wouldn’t be out of place on a Goblin record.

Give it a listen. And remember that in Soviet Russia, records listen to you.

Hey, I’ve been writing about 1980s Soviet pop culture for the past two hours, I’m allowed one Yakov Smirnoff reference.