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Japan has four synthesizer seasons

Sunday, November 15th, 2020

I haven’t posted anything in a couple of weeks. I’m in the middle of a move right now (great timing, I know) and that’s been taking up a good chunk of my time. But boy, a lot sure has changed in the world since I last wrote anything here, huh? Shit, a lot’s changed in the time between me starting this post and ending it!

Trump lost! Yay! Good!

COVID cases are spiraling out of control! Boo! Bad!

In conclusion, October and November have been a land of contrasts.

My move to a new apartment is still ongoing and will take some time. I’m not leaving Japan, don’t worry. Shit, I’m not even leaving my current building. I’m just upgrading to a bigger place so my boyfriend can move in with me (double yay). But I have about a month to go before the move is final and I still have to buy some more furniture, hook up internet, schedule the movers, get rid of a shitload of junk I don’t need, and arrange to have someone from Disk Union come out to buy an extra few hundred records that I don’t want to lug up to my new place because I already have so many records that I’m going to have to get custom shelves built once I get settled in the new apartment.

I’m not an addict you’re an addict shut up.

Let’s enjoy the impending end of the the orange autocrat with some relaxing (or excitng?) synthesizers and keyboards.

Koichi Oki – Exciting Keyboards: Four Seasons

It’s funny, for some reason I’ve been thinking about Vivaldi’s Four Seasons quite a lot lately. I wonder why.

This is not the first version of Four Seasons that I’ve shared on this blog. Shit, it’s not even the second. It’s the fourth. One was an all koto arrangement, while the other two were largely synthesized affairs. All were from Japan. Japan sure loves arranging Vivaldi. I think that’s because Japan has four seasons.

That’s an English teacher joke and trust me it’s hilarious.

This rendition of Vivaldi’s classic work is by a man named Koichi Oki. He released a few albums in Japan throughout the 1970s, and his work represents a unique subset of the Japanese record market of that time. Nearly all of his release were made, marketed, and sold solely to promote Yamaha keyboards. There were a ton of these records in the 70s and into the 80s here in Japan. The sub-standard ones really fill up the bargain bins. Yamaha really wanted people to know about their electone line of electric organs.

Oki’s albums aren’t even shy about this. On many, the Yamaha branding is downright omnipresent, and the name of the electone or synthesizer he’s playing on the album is often name-dropped in the album title as well. You have titles like Yamaha Superstar! Koichi Plays GX-1, and Koichi Oki Meets GX-707. These are basically demonstration records that Yamaha had the audacity to slap a price on and sell.

And I’m glad they did! Because the good ones are really good. This album owns. Comparing it to the previous synthesizer Vivaldi albums I shared, I would say it’s not as good as Frank Becker’s version of the suite, but it’s better than the Shigeaki Saegusa version. I really like Becker’s take since it’s just synthesizer and violin. Saegusa’s version features much more of a full band, almost too much at times. This one is a good middle ground. This record was made to showcase Yamaha’s keyboards after all, so they get the center stage, but a bit of guitar and some rad drumming on here as well. The opening of the Summer section, for example, slaps with some fantastic banging on the skins. I was not at all surprised to learn that the drummer on this is Akira Ishikawa, a legendary jazz drummer in Japan whose records are often sought after by DJs and producers because if their sick beats. Dude is a legend.

Of course, this is an Oki abum, so he takes the spotlight for most of it, and I really enjoy the sounds he’s able to pull out of that electone. The electone was an electronic organ, but I think that he has the thing patched through some other synthesizer to give it extra oomph. It’s not a combination you hear a lot (if at all) and it really stands out when compared to other synthesizer records of the era. He goes out there with some really crazy sounds at times, but he also knows when to reign it in with more traditional sounds that you’d hear from a normal-ass organ. It’s a great mix. It’s part classical, part rock, part funk, with a light dash of jazz thrown in on top.

Strangely, this album was released many times, often with different titles and artwork. In was first released in Japan in 1973 under the name Electone Fantastic – Vivialdi Four Seasons. Big electone branding for the domestic market, not surprising. But the album was also released in a few different overseas territories. Discogs only has the Dutch and Italian copies listed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got released in other markets as well. In the Netherlands, the album was renamed Four Synthesizer Seasons, with simple classy artwork showcasing each season. In Italy, it was just called Le Quattro Stagioni – Vivaldi, which translates to, duh, The Four Seasons – Vivaldi. That cover is very similar to the original Japanese cover, but the caricature of Oki on the cover was replaced with what I assume is a cartoon portrait of Vivaldi. I will not stand for such synthesizer whitewashing!

However, I have none of those versions. For some reason, the album was re-released in 1978, with an entirely different title, Exciting Keyboards – Four Seasons. I mean, I like this album a lot, but I don’t know if it’s exciting. Fun, maybe? Refreshing? Uplifting? Sure, but exciting? Let’s not get carried away.

Speaking of getting carried away, check out that rad as hell album cover! The one at the top I mean. The one with the naked lady jumping rope with a freaking laser beam! In space! Forget what I said earlier, that’s some exciting shit for sure. I wish I could take a better picture of it, but I already packed up my records for the move, wrecking my back in the process. I sure as heck am not going to risk further injury just to take a high-res photo of the naked laser space jump rope lady. Sorry. Maybe some other time.

If you’re traveling through space with a naked lady and a laser jump rope, let me know if this album is a fitting soundtrack. Although please do the responsible thing and delay and trips (intergalactic or otherwise) until the coronavirus cases decrease a bit. Seriously. Stay at home. Listen to wonky 70s electronic albums and order a pizza. You can always go see your family and consume unhealthy amounts of turkey next year. Please.

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Posted in Complete Albums | 2 Comments »

Less Stress More Ambient Pop 2020

Sunday, September 6th, 2020

Hi. Are you stressed? I’m stressed. I wonder why. Maybe it’s the global pandemic and the still present risk that I or any of my loved ones could be stricken with a potentially fatal virus at anytime. That’s the kind of the thing that could keep one up at night.

Maybe it’s the unprecedented global heat waves, forest fires, and deadly storms. Rapid climate change is here, everyone! It’s not going to cause the extinction of humankind, but it sure as fuck isn’t a picnic. And the heat seems to be getting worse in Tokyo every summer. The masks don’t help either.

I think that it could be the election that’s making me stressed. Fate of the free world riding on an election that will probably be corrupt and rigged by the incumbent party. Scary thought. It’s definitely keeping me up at night.

Or maybe I’m stressed out, cant’ sleep, and am having a hard time writing because my big toe (right foot, for those curious…ew) decided to get an infection and swell up like a balloon before exploding in a rainbow of wondrous puss.

Might be that. Who knows. Anyways, stressful times call for relaxing tunes. And this is the most relaxing stuff I have at the moment.

And don’t worry, I went to the doctor and got a cream for my toe.

 

Dip In The Pool
Rabo Del Sol
Spring From The Surface
Sur Le Pois
Again
I first wrote about Dip In The Pool back in October of 2019. I called them a Japanese Cocteau Twins, chill as fuck, beautiful, awesome, and so on and so forth. I stand by all of that. And much of what I wrote in that post goes double here.

These tracks are from the group’s 1986 EP, Rabo Del Sol. All the tracks from it eventually made their way onto the band’s self-titled debut LP, which came out later that year. I don’t know if these versions are in anyway different than the ones on the LP, because I can’t find that album anywhere. For some reason, the overwhelming majority of this band’s output continues to be out of print. That gives me stress too, but I’m going to try and not focus on that.

These tracks aren’t all that different than the ones I featured before. Again, very chill. Very ambient. Very mellow. This is music for listening to with a nice red wine, preferably in a bubble bath. This is some of my go to music in the winter, when I go for late-night walks after work downtown. The city is quiet, almost alien-like, and the music serves as an incredibly fitting soundtrack to it. I’m not listening to them too much right now when I’m out walking, however. My walks at the moment tend to be in the morning, in the oppressive sunny heat, and are more about losing weight than chilling out. Dip In The Pool are many, many things, but “workout music” sure as hell ain’t one of them.

Enjoy the chill tunes for un-chill times and decidedly un-chill weather.

By the way, a quick programming note, if you will. Posts here might stay bi-weekly or so for a bit. Nearly everything I have queued up to post here is incredibly obscure and hard to write about. I don’t like to rush those posts. So I apologize if things slow down here again for a while. This could, of course, change at a moment’s notice if I happen upon a score of CD maxi-singles or something like that. You never know. I might also just say “fuck it” and write about Madonna singles for a while again. Still got a load of those to get through!

Also, I do plan on finishing my articles about MTV’s Top 100 of 1985. I’m very close with the next section. But…stress. Trying to be witty and funny about 80s pop is really hard when the world is on fire. I’ll give another go this week, I know a few of you really like those articles, so I appreciate your patience very much!

Stay positive. And chill.

Posted in Complete Albums, dip in the pool | 3 Comments »

I’m back and I brought the forgotten J-Pop

Sunday, August 23rd, 2020

If you were reading my site last week…you weren’t because it fucking exploded into fire.

It’s a long story, but I tried to update something, it very much did not work, and the efforts to restore it did not work either. This necessitated a off-site restore from my hosting provider, and that took much longer than they originally estimated. It was not a fun time. I was not happy. But it’s taken care of now. I’m still not happy, but that has more to do with the state of the world and my own personal health than the health of my website.

However, I really do need to get around to updating this site at some point. It’s a damn mess. This site an imported version of a 14-year-old Blogspot site. It’s extremely cutting edge for the mid-2000s. Although I really don’t know what I would “updating” this site would entail. It’s an MP3 blog. It’s gonna stay an MP3 blog. I could probably figure out a way to make it look slightly less ugly but, meh, it’s hard! I guess the only thing I really want to do is clean up the back-end and streamline it a bit. But again, I have no idea how to do any of this. I paid a tech-savvy friend to do all this years ago, she has since moved to Oregon and I have since moved to another country. That complicates things.

I’ll probably figure something out. In the meantime, if my site mysteriously vanishes again, be sure to check me out on Twitter, I’ll probably be posting vulgarity-filled updates if that happens. I should also mention that while Twitter is a garbage fire of rancid shit, it’s still the best way to get a hold of me quickly if you have any questions or concerns about anything. I check it more than I should.

Some other news, I’m still working my way through MTV’s 1985 Top 100 countdown over on my other site, and I’m probably going to get to the Top 20 sometime in the next week or two. I also plan on writing up something about all the amazing commercials that aired during the countdown. If you want a sneak peak of that, I uploaded a ton of them to my YouTube channel. I especially love this video store one, because I literally grew up in a video store and that triggers all them nostalgia dopamine triggers. Blurry VHS box art is like heroin to me, is what I’m saying.

 

 

Between both the world and my blog being on fire last week, I was swinging back-and-forth wildly between happy upbeat music to cheer me up, and supreme angry music to help me fester in negativity. I’m going to share the former tonight and not the latter. I don’t want to spread even more unneeded negativity in the world, and most of the angry music I was listening to was Korn’s dubstep album. No one needs to hear that. ALTHOUGH I SINCERELY THINK IT’S UNDERRATED.

Anyways, no Korn dubstep. 80s J-pop!

 

 

Shohjo-Tai – From S (Complete album)
There’s so much 80 J-pop out there (because bubble economy) that digging through it is nearly impossible. I always know that there’s good stuff buried in there, but I never know what to look for. I have no cultural context, plus I can’t even read 90% of the names, so that’s a problem. Imagine looking through crates of Western 80s pop music with zero context or understanding of anything about who was popular and when. You probably wouldn’t get lucky enough to stumble onto a Madonna record, you’d wind up getting something like the third Stacey Q record, or a Spoons album. That’s how it feels when I dig through a store’s stock of 80s J-pop. I’m looking for another YMO, but I usually end up with Japan’s answer to Mr. Mister or some bullshit like that. Thankfully I get help from my students on occasion, who direct me to groups like Shohjo-Tai.

I first featured Shohjo-Tai a couple years back. Not soon after a client recommended them to me I was able to find one of their singles in a store. I dug it, and got interested enough in the group to try and find more releases by them. Unfortunately, every other album or single I found by them just didn’t hold my attention as much as that first one. Everything was fine, they weren’t aggressively bad or anything, but they all had that overly polished, generic sound that far too much J-pop has. No personality, all kawaii, too many ballads. Boring.

I think a big problem with Shohjo-Tai is that they just put too much stuff out. Between 1984 and 1989, they released ten albums! Some were only EP length, but still, that’s a lot of music. Many of the very best artists of all-time, with careers that span decades, can’t put together 10 albums of great material. For a pop act to shovel out that much in such a short period of time is crazy.

In 1986 alone, they released four albums. I have two. One is Untouchable. It’s fine. It’s certainly not untouchable, but it’s decent upbeat pop music. The other is this one, From S. There are definitely more highlights in its six songs and 28 minute runtime than in the entirety of Untouchable‘s 43 minutes of 10 songs.

It’s a very creative album, and evens skews on the experimental side at times. “Natsu no Passport” opens the album strong with a synthesized bang, and a catchy keyboard melody helps carry it through. But then near the end the song completely breaks down into a short breakdown that’s reminiscent of The Art Of Noise’s best stuff, before re-assembling itself for the fade out. It comes out of left field and it really gives the song some character.

It’s followed by “Sanzennen No Yume,” a slower ballad. J-pop ballads usually bore me to death, but again, this one is just a bit different. The synthesizers, drum machines, and whatever other electronic doo-hickeys they got playing in the background give it something different, and it also has a fantastic breakdown near the end, with one of the strangest, most out-of-place solos of random sound I’ve ever heard in a pop tune.

The highlight of the entire album comes next, “Siam Paradise,” a pulsing tune with a fantastic beat. Awesome use of samplers and a great melody. This sounds like YMO. It really, really sounds like YMO (more on that in a bit). It’s super catchy and in my dream compilation of Japanese 80s synth-pop, it would totally be track three.

Most of the rest is also good. “Oriental Nights” is a little more generic, it lacks the crazy breakdowns and other innovations of the previous numbers, but it’s still a solid number. “Kinou no New Moon” picks things up again, with oodles of fantastic synths and drum machines. The only weak track on the entire thing is the finale, “Ikoku no Shinwa” which is just a generic 80s J-pop ballad. And if I wanted to hear those I’d listen to Yuming.

If you’re wondering why this album stands out so much when compared to the rest of their discography, well it probably has something to do with who worked on it. From what I can tell, all the Shohjo-Tai albums had fantastic production and session musicians on them. When I browse their pages on Discogs, nearly everyone who worked on their records have long careers across dozens of albums. But this one goes even above those.

Remember, how I said that the synthesizers here really stand out? And that the album occasionally reminds me of good YMO? Well, that’s because Haruomi Hosono of YMO and singer/songwriter extraordinaire Koshi Miharu both played keyboard and synthesizers here. Hosono even co-wrote a couple tracks on the album, including the standout “Siam Paradise.” That’s a hell of a duo to get on your album, especially in 1986, when both were at their peak in terms of their electronic music output. No wonder Japanese record geeks go after this one.

I hope this heavily synthesized, overly cheery synth-pop will serve you well this week. Enjoy.

Posted in Complete Albums, Shojo Tai | 2 Comments »

Obscure synthesizers and amazing suits

Tuesday, July 21st, 2020

Graziano Mandozzi – Bach Handel 300 (complete album)
Sometimes I want to write about something even though I’m woefully lacking in the knowledge to do so. Here’s one of those times. Apologies for omissions or errors. Correct me (politely) in the comments!

Bach Handel 300 is a collection of synthesizer covers of compositions by (duh) Bach and Handel. It was originally released on by the influential and prestigious Deutsche Grammophone record label in 1985. Now, if you’re like me and you obsess over synthesizer covers of classical compositions, that date probably surprises you. Most classical synth albums came out in the first half of the 70s, all of them riding the coat tails of Wendy Carlos’ legendary Switched On Bach album. By the mid-80s, the novelty of the format had long worn off. Even in Japan, where synth covers albums seemed to be much more popular, I don’t see many from after 1978.

But this one probably had a very specific reason for existing; I think it was serving a commercial for the synthesizers used on the album. This album doesn’t feature Moogs, nor Korgs, nor any early digital synthesizers like the Fairlight or Synclavier. This album was made entirely on PPG Wave synthesizers. PPG was a German company. Deutsche Grammophone was a German label (duh) so, yeah, the synergy makes sense.

Never heard of the PPG synthesizer? Me neither! But apparently they were used a bit by synthpop acts of the era, if the Wikipedia page is to be believed. I’m not very good at picking up individual synths in songs aside from old-school moogs and the Synclavier, so I couldn’t tell you which songs have good examples of the PPG Wave, but I know they’re out there.

The PPG Wave was a different style of synthesizer. While the synths of the 80s were almost exclusively pure analog, and the synths of the 80s were digital affairs, the PGG Wave series were something in-between, analog/digital hybrids that provided a wide range of sounds with superior audio quality. They were apparently groundbreaking in a few different ways, but again, this is not my element so I’m not going to speak too much about it. But I will definitely say that the PPG has a unique sound that reminds me of analog synths of the 70s, with the variety and range of the 80s digital stuff. You get your warped, ghostly analog sounds alongside your crystal clear, bright, 80s notes. It also has a grit to it that was probably to its detriment at the time, but gives it a unique quality now that makes it stand apart from the cleaner all-digital synths of the era. I have another classical synthesizer album from the same year called Bachbusters. It’s on all digital synthesizers. It’s boring as hell. This one has way more personality.

But it never did reach the popularity of those other synths, sadly. This album came out in 1985, and PPG went belly-up just two years later. A lot of PPG systems still seem to be out there though, so if you dig the sound on this album head over to YouTube and you’ll find more examples of the sounds it can create.

I just realize that I’ve spent over 500 words going over the synthesizers used on this album but I haven’t even mentioned the man playing them! The man with a fantastic mustache and wonderful suit, exuding the confidence that only a man surrounded by thousands of dollars of digital equipment can.

That would be one Graziano Mandozzi, credited on the album as simply “Mandozzi” like he’s synth Prince or something. Ballsy move. I respect it. A Swiss composer, Mandozzi has a short, but insanely interesting discography that I hope to dig into more. He has an album called Masada that was recently released on vinyl and digitally via Bandcamp that is just insane. It’s some funk/jazz/experimental/psych rock monstrosity that was apparently the soundtrack to a ballet?! How anyone danced to it is beyond me. It’s rad as hell though. If you download this and like it, do the right thing and go buy that album to show support. Digital copies are cheap, and the vinyl comes with a download code.

I feel like I end all my posts recently in the same way, but I hope you all are doing well out there. Things are really scary right now, especially in the states. If you can, stay home, listen to stupid records like this and get drunk. That’s what I’ve been doing and it usually works for me.

Posted in Complete Albums, Mandozzi | 2 Comments »

Tomita covering Elvis and such

Wednesday, May 27th, 2020

Japan has been lifting its state of emergency gradually over the past couple of weeks, as cases of the coronavirus here have declined. Last week, most record stores in Tokyo finally re-opened.

I’m still being cautious. I don’t want to take the train right now, so I’m not going to a lot of my absolute favorite stores, but I did make the quick walk to Shinjuku to check out the Disk Union stores around there.

The first thing that struck me was how deserted the area around the stores was. That part of Shinjuku is usually crowded. It’s right next to a major entrance, has dozens of restaurants, and several department stores. But walking traffic was down by about 75%, there just weren’t many people out. A lot of bigger stores are still closed, and people aren’t eating out as much, so that probably had a lot to do with it.

The Disk Union stores in Shinjuku are absolutely wonderful, but they’re all a little cramped. Social distancing in those stores is an impossibility. There were signs up that said they might limit the number of people allowed in at once if things got crowded. Additionally, masks were 100% mandatory, as was using the provided hand sanitizer whenever you entered a new floor. There were also plastic curtains up that separated the customers and the clerks. Any floor that had windows (not many) had them open. The first floor Union Record store I went to had their front doors open. They were also the most reorganized, doubling the amount of space in front of the registers to allow for greater distancing between people.

Are their solutions perfect? No way. As I said, the stores are small and cramped, there’s no way for them to become 100% safe. But they’re trying their best. In a perfect world they could stay closed even longer, but that’s just not realistic unfortunately. Given the circumstances, I think that their precautions will help. Masks aren’t perfect, but they can help. If everyone is wearing a mask, using hand sanitizer, and keeping as much distance as they can, I think that will greatly work to minimize and potential risk of infection. Also, most of the people who go to the record stores go alone and don’t talk much, that alone cuts down any infection risk.

I’m doing my part by not going to eight million stores a week. I would hate to be asymptomatic and carry the virus around to all my favorite record stores. Tower Records is open now (HURRAH!) but I’m going to wait until next week before I go (BOO!). Then I’ll wait another week before I go to Coconuts Disk. And then another before I check our Recofan again. As much as they would all appreciate my business right now, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And I’ll for sure make up for any lost purchases when I go to their stores, that’s for damn sure.

I bought some cool stuff this week at Disk Union, but I still have to physically clean and record those records. In the meantime, here’s another weird synthesizer record from the 1970s. Shocking, I know.

Isao Tomita – Switched On Rock (Complete Album Download)

Isao Tomita is one of the big three of early synthesizer music, right behind Wendy Carlos and Jean-Michel Jarre. His 1974 release, Snowflakes Are Dancing, which reworks compositions by Claude Debussy, was revolutionary when it came out. It charted on the American Billboard charts and even netted Tomita a few Grammy nominations.

But it wasn’t his first album. This was. Released in 1972, Switched On Rock is another in a seemingly endless line of synthesizer covers albums that flooded record stores after the runaway success of Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach.

Like most Switched-On Bach copies, Switched-On Rock lacks the complexity and craft of Carlos’ original work. Carlos went through the hassle of recording layers upon layers of synthesizer melodies to build incredibly complex and detailed recreations of Bach’s original compositions. Synthesizers of the time were not polyphonic, so if you wanted a rich, full sound that meant lots of overdubbing.

Tomita didn’t go that route. He instead kept things simple. There’s some polyphonic work going on here, but not nearly at the level that’s found on Carlos’ record. Also, it’s not an entirely electronic album, with acoustic drums showing up on most tracks. Tomita also played it safe with track selection. As the title suggests, Tomita covers rock tunes here, not classical works. Rock songs, especially the rock songs he chose, are a hell of a lot easier to re-arrange for synthesizer than Bach or DeBussey, that’s for sure. They’re all little more than a basic melody and a backbeat. Lots of Beatles covers, Simon & Garfunkel, Elvis and other oldies.

That’s not to say that the album is boring or bland. Far from it. What Tomita lacks for in complexity here, he more than makes up for with weirdness. I’m not good with technical terms, so I don’t know what effects Tomita was applying here, I just know that it sounds weird. His synthesizers sound drunk, with the sounds often having a strange wobbling or bouncing effect added to them. And everything is put through an echo, giving it all a etheral dreamlike quality.

The album had a limited release. It came out in Japan first, and then was later released in the UK. There, Tomita was billed as “Electric Samurai” because Orientalism sells. It never got a release in the states and from what I can find online, there’s never been an official release on CD either, making it one of the rarest releases in the Tomita catalog.

Like all Moog albums, transferring the vinyl recording in a way that created a clean digital copy was not easy. Early synthesizers create harsh, abrasive sounds. Most audio cleaning programs pick those waveforms up as pops or cracks and they try to remove them. I could only do a very light pass on the lowest settings to remove the more drastic scratches. Then I went through again manually and removed more, before also scrubbing a bit of the background surface noise that’s found on all vinyl recordings. I think it sounds good, but if you hear a few mistakes or odd blips here and there, that’s why.

Listen to moog music and wear a mask. It’s the right thing to do.

Posted in Complete Albums, Tomita | 1 Comment »

Osamu Shoji’s Kaleidoscope of Movie Medleys

Sunday, April 26th, 2020

Osamu Shoji – Kaleidoscreen (Complete Album Download)

I’ve been posting a lot of complete albums lately. I hope my hosting service doesn’t kill me.

This is the (checks my expansive archive) fourth Osamu Shoji album I’ve posted in full. As I probably said in each of those previous posts (and other posts where I shared single tracks from his other albums), Shoji was a synth God with a capital G who produced some totally wacked out and insane pieces of music in his day. If you want to know more, I wrote a piece about him when he passed away a few years back.

Kaleidoscreen was first released in in 1982 and was probably Shoji’s 18th album. I say “probably” because English information on Shoji’s discography is still a little hard to come by. Since I first got into his music a few years back, several albums of his have been added to Discogs (mostly by me), so it wouldn’t at all surprise me if there are more holes out there that also need to be filled.

The early 80s were an incredibly prolific time for Shoji, between 1980 and 1985 the dude pumped out close to 30 albums. A few were original works, but the overwhelming majority were synthesizer covers albums. His bread and butter during this period was to release synthesizer covers albums of popular anime themes. There were all released under the “Digital Trip” series brand, which featured work by other synthesizer and keyboard greats, such as Jun Fukumachi.

But Kaleidoscreen is a bit different. Instead of sticking to one movie, anime, or series, he cast a wider net and covered themes from multiple movies, most of which were from America. These types of albums, of course, were not uncommon in the 1970s. I have countless collections of movie themes “switched on” for synthesizer. This one is a bit different though in terms of scope. Because while most synthesizer covers albums were content to have 10 or 12 movie themes reworked for the synthesizer. Shoji decided to shoot for the fences and compose 10 medleys that, when combined, featured snippets of SEVENTY-TWO pieces of music from a variety of different films.

A case of quantity over quality? Perhaps. The entire album does come off a bit cheesy, and the swings from theme to theme are sometimes so fast that you barely have time to register one before it moves onto the next. Additionally, the entire thing kind of has an elevator music/early-MIDI vibe to it, probably thanks to the prevalence of a rather generic beat that is played over most of the tunes. THAT BEING SAID I still love this album for all its ridiculousness, and the insane gusto that Shoji obviously put behind it. The dude just went for it. And I love how many deep cuts and oddball choices he included. Yeah, anyone could’ve (and did) make synth renditions of music from Star Wars, the James Bond films, and Rocky, but nobody else, for example, heard the themes to Laura, Days Of Wine And Roses, and The Way We Were and thought “Yo, what these themes need is more synthesizers and drum machines.” There’s a real sense of bravado there that I can really get behind.

This is not high art or a radical piece of work that re-invented electronic music. This is a piece of incredibly complicated, yet incredibly silly, music. It puts a smile to my face, even now, and I hope that it can do the same for you.

Below is the complete track listing, featuring all the songs that are included in each medley, in case you were curious.

Medley 1
Also Sprach Zarasthustra
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
Theme From Star Trek
The Throne Room
Main Title From Star Wars

Medley 2
The Big Country
I Left My Love
Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head
The River Of No Return
Johnny Guitar
The Call Of The Far-Away Hills
My Rifle, My Pony And Me
Buttons And Bows
Gunfight At O.K. Corral

Medley 3
The Theme From The Shaft
Charade
Whatever Will Be, Will Be
Laura
The Pink Panther Theme
The Entertainer
Love Theme From Godfather

Medley 4
Carioca
Cheek To Cheek
The Way You Look Tonight
Continental
A Foggy Day
Orchids In The Moonlight
Night And Day

Medley 5
The Geat Escape
Waltz From “Is Paris Burning?”
55 Days At Peking
The Guns Of Navarone
Exodus
Main Title Of Lawrence Of Arabia
The Longest Day

Medley 6 (James Bond Medley)
The James Bond Theme
Moonraker
No Boody Does It Better
For Your Eyes Only
Goldfinger
Thunderball
From Russia With Love

Medley 7
Three Coins In The Fountain
Love Letters
Never On Sunday
Sentimental Journey
Tara’s Theme
My Foolish Heart
Day Of Wine And Roses
Love Is My Splendored Thing
September Song

Medley 8
Gonna Fly Mow
Sound Of Silence
What Is Youth
Grease
How Deep Is Your Love
East Of Eden
A Summer Place

Medley 9
The Magnificent seven
The Green Leaves Of Summer
The Proud One
Ballad Of Davy Crockett
My Darling Clementine
Bury Me Not In Lone Prairie
High Noon
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

Medley 10
The Shadow Of Your Smile
Windmills Of Your Mind
Moon River
What’ll I Do
The Way We Were
The Rosy’s Theme

Posted in Complete Albums, Osamu Shoji | 1 Comment »

Radical music by Radical TV

Thursday, April 16th, 2020

Radical TV – AV Kids (complete album download)

Just when I thought that I had hunted down every Yellow Magic Orchestra associated act that ever existed, no matter how incidental their connection to the uber-influential Japanese synthpop legends was, I stumble upon something that proves that I probably have even more to find, an incredible piece of lost techno-pop that renews my entire interest in the genre: AV Kids by Radical TV.

It’s very hard to dig up information on Radical TV in English. Strike that, it’s literally impossible to dig up any information on Radical TV in English. I suspect that when this blog post is complete, it will be the most anyone has ever written about the group in English.

A quick glimpse at Radical TV’s Discogs page shows that they only have two releases to their name, this mini-album that I’m sharing tonight, and a video release that was done in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto of YMO. That video album came out in 1988, while this EP preceded it by two years. They could have more releases though, Discogs is not all-knowing and all-seeing. In fact, their Discogs page had several mistakes that I am just now fixing as I’m writing this. Originally, the album’s page only had one credited artist on it, a man by the name of Yoshifumi Ito. Now, while Ito did seem to be a predominate creative force behind the group, in the album’s liner notes he’s not even credited as a member, the only people credited as actually being part of the group were Daizaburo Harada and Haruhiko Shono. Harada performed vocals on the album, but Shono’s role is a bit of mystery. While every other performer on the record is credited, in detail, with their contributions, he is not. He’s just listed as a member of the group, and nothing else.

Neither Harada nor Shono were very prolific in music, according to Discogs anyway. Outside of Radical TV, they only have a couple of credits to their names, all of which are visual or technical. While they’re credited as composers on a few tracks, I suspect that they were primarily responsible for the visual element of the band’s performances, which was something else (and I’ll be getting to in a bit).

The group was probably Ito’s baby, it certainly sounds like other albums and artists he was working with at the time. He produced records for synthpop acts like Shi-Shonen and Hajime Tachibana, who shared Radical TV’s sampler/fairlight-heavy sound. He also played keyboards on albums by Togawa Jun and Yukihiro Takahashi, who also had a sampler heavy sound at the time. He was very prolific throughout the 80s, according to Discogs I own 43 releases in which he receives some sort of credit.

While Ito was a keyboardist, he’s not the credited keyboardist on this album. The keys here are played by Hiroaki Sugawara. He also worked with several of the artists already mentioned here, as well as Ryuichi Sakamoto. In fact, he handled the Fairlight programming for Sakamoto and David Byrne’s Academy Award winning score to The Last Emperor. So hey, he’s got that going for him.

This may be a synthpop record with keys a plenty, but it’s also an 80s pop record, which can mean only one thing – extraneous saxophone! Saxophone duties on the album were handled by Hiroyashu Yaguchi. While he had a short-lived solo career in the later half of the decade, with two albums to his name, he was much more prolific behind the scenes. He also worked with Shi-Shonen and Hajime Tachibana, and was a member another synth act from the time, Real Fish. Additionally, he played on some albums by my favorite 80s pop idol, Epo, and everyone’s favorite city pop star, Taeko Ohnuki.

Finally, the album was “executive produced” by Yukihiro Takahashi, but I think that just means he thew some money and/or keyboards at it. The album was released on the T.E.N.T. sub-label of Pony Canyon, which handled a lot of Takahashi’s (very bad) solo albums from this period. I don’t know if T.E.N.T. was a vanity label that Takahashi set up, but they were obviously strongly connected.

So, that’s a lot about the people behind this music, but how is the music itself?

It’s fan-fucking-tastic.

Given the amazing quality of this record, and the people associated with it, I’m surprised that it took me this long to discover it. This is really a quality piece of late-80s synthpop, with Fairlight-a-plenty. The instrumental opener “Shot,” has a fantastic drum machine sound and an absolutely stellar keyboard melody. This sounds like a lost YMO track, it’s so good. The quality keeps up throughout the EP. “Frontier” sounds like a perfect amalgamation of Takahashi’s (good) solo work from the first half of the 80s, thanks to Harada’s wonky vocals, and Sakamoto’s sampler-heavy sound that he experimented with on Futurista. It has a fantastic groove to it as well.

With “愛のソビエト” (Soviet Love), things slow down a bit, but that Fairlight sound shines through, and Harada drops his Takahashi impression to deliver his best vocals of the album. It’s a nice quiet bit that is immediately brought to a close with the incredible, and incredibly jarring, “XYZ,” which features Speak and Spell samples and absolutely bonkers vocals that seem to combine actual singing and cut-and-paste samples. It’s a crazy track that reminds me of Thomas Dolby’s more adventurous material and some of the stuff that Takahashi would be doing nearly a decade later, when he would get out of his late-80s nadir.

A mechanical beat serves as a backbone for the ballad “TVアイドル” (TV Idol), which is probably the most standard pop song on the record. If this one was translated into English I could imagine Howard Jones or Nik Kershaw covering it, for good or bad. The synths on this one are actually a little bland until about halfway through, when a bizarre collage of nearly-random noise breaks things up. What really keeps the song going is that 80s sax. A slow jam, but a jam nonetheless.

And then we end with a cover of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” with all vocals delivered through a vocoder, with a steel drum sound that sounds like it was taken out of Super Mario Bros. 3, because why the hell not. It’s awesome.

 

As radical (he he) as the sound of this album is, the main members of Radical TV were visual artists first and foremost. The visual element of their persona seemed to be just as, if not more, important than the music. Despite only a single EP and a collaborative video album to their name, there’s quite a bit of Radical TV video up on YouTube, and it’s all really amazing with a lot of computer video effects that were definitely cutting edge. Some of it even has a digital/”cyber” aesthetic to it that feels a decade ahead of its time.

Much of their collaboration with Sakamoto can be found on YouTube, and I really suggest checking it out. From what I can gather, their collaboration, TV War, was used as a showcase for the then brand-new Sony Jumbotron, as you can see in this video and this one. The music/soundscapes are fantastic, and it’s all a really great look at how visual artists of the 80s were using the then-nascent technology of computer graphics to create some really fabulous stuff in a style that is largely forgotten today.

The group also released a video for the track “XYZ” and while it’s not as cutting-edge as their work with Sakamoto, it’s still pretty damn awesome.

 

He-Man! By the power of Grayskull! And a digital sampler!

I say “this shit is dope” a lot, but yo, “this shit is dooope.” I hope everyone likes it.

Posted in Complete Albums | 4 Comments »

SELF-ISOLATION DISCO PARTY WHAAAAT

Thursday, April 9th, 2020

My boyfriend and I have taken the whole “not leaving the house” thing as far as we can, as things are really starting to ramp up here in Tokyo. Did you know that you can buy junk food in bulk on Amazon? Guess who has a cupboard full of potato chips, fried squid, beef jerky, and Oreos?

Yo.

We also bought a shitton of puzzles on Amazon. They’re a great way to kill the time, and we can listen to music at the same time. Right now, we’ve been burning through the massive 33 CD Encore Donna Summer box set. That thing is a monster. So many remixes and single edits. It came at just the right time for me to ingest a massive amount of music too, so at least I got that going for me, which is nice.

All that disco has certainly put me in a dance mood lately, and in the rare hours where we’re not shaking our jigsaw-solving butts to extended remixes of “Hot Stuff,” we’ve been rocking out to this album.

That’s Eurobeat Non-Stop Megamix
Michael Fortunati Mega Mix
Stock, Aitken & Waterman Mega Mix
Eurobeat is so fucking stupid I love it so much. Ironic music is for assholes, give me something that is base-level designed for mindless brain dead stupid motherfucker gay ass bullshit any day of the week, especially right now. World in shambles, society collapsing, pump these beats directly into my cerebral cortex so hard and so loud that they jackhammer all the bullshit out of my head and replace it with four on the floor beats until my brain is mush and I can’t think of anything at all. Give me shit that makes Abba seem deep. Give me shit that makes Erasure seem low-key. I want the musical equivalent of Richard Gere in American Gigolo, dumb as rocks, hot as hell, and with gay subext.

This LP of two non-stop Hi-NRGH mega-mixes certainly fits that bill. One mix for each side, on side A we got a mix of tracks by Italo Disco superstar Michael Fortunati, and on the B-side a selection of lesser-known tracks by uber-hitmaker dance music factory Stock, Aitken & Waterman, the people who brought you “You Spin Me Round,” “I Should Be So Lucky,” “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and “I Don’t Wanna Get Hurt.” Sure, most of those songs sound the same, but who cares. SAW are the Motorhead of dance music. They basically write two or three songs over and over and over again, but they’re such bangers no one complains.

I’m not that familiar with Michael Fortunati, but if this mix is any indication as to the quality or style of his work, sign me the fuck up. Great shit. “Into the Night (Slip and Slide)” is a fantastic amazing opener to this mix, and the (high) energy keeps going throughout the entirety of it. His side is actually more upbeat than the SAW side which start out with a medley of slightly more downbeat tracks by Princess. I know that she was rather popular in the UK for a bit, but I had never heard of her, and didn’t recognize any of the songs that make an appearance in the mix.

Their mix really picks up after the Princess tracks though, as it segues in Hazell Dean’s absolutely lovely “Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go).” I only recently discovered Dean’s music (this type of stuff never broke through in the states) and damn it’s good. No wonder she’s called the queen of Hi-NRG, she’s like a white Donna Summer on ecstasy.

From Dean the mix shifts hard into “I’m So Beautiful” by Divine. Yes, that Divine. Divine was a fantastic drag queen and a wonderful actor. She could not sing. Like, not even a little bit. But she owned it. And her horrible raspy, driveway gravel of a voice ends up somehow working in the end. Maybe just by sheer willpower or a complete lack of anything even remotely resembling shame. Gotta respect that level of not giving a fuck.

Fellow drag artist Lana Pellay closes things out with her single “Pistol In My Pocket.” I’m not 100% sure I’m using the right pronouns with Lana, who also goes by the name of Al from what I’ve read? Please forgive me if I’m fucking up here, it’s not out of disrespect. This song slaps. She can certainly sing better than Divine, but I think I like the message of Divine’s “I’m So Beautiful” more than this track. There’s something about a morbidly obese drag queen screaming violently at me to tell me that she, and I, are beautiful that I just get with on a deep, philosophical level.

Although I do love “Pistol In My Pocket.” It’s basically a prolonged dick joke and I can get behind that.

When this whole thing ends let’s gay dance party outside, okay?

Posted in Complete Albums | 3 Comments »

Synths with my man Barry

Thursday, April 2nd, 2020

It’s April 2nd. The number of cases of coronavirus in Tokyo has just about doubled in a week, but the government still has not declared a state of emergency so people are still going to work everyday. Literally everything I see is bad news and there is no good news on the horizon. It is soul-crushing.

Let’s talk about some new music.

I’ve gotten way into synthwave lately. I’m buying almost everything that New Retro Wave has to offer at the moment. Of that, I highly recommend the latest albums by Wolfcub, Turboslash, Akuma & Tokyo Rose, and Tonebox. Yes, none of this is exceptionally original or groundbreaking but I don’t really care. It sounds good, it’s fantastic background music for writing, and it keeps me in a good headspace.

I’m also getting way into a group called Magic Sword. Their album Endless is also synthwave, but it has a bit more of an organic sound. I don’t know if they use acoustic drums, or if they just go for acoustic drum sounds. Regardless, it has a good 70s electronic vibe to it, kind of Tangerine Dream at times, and I’m into it. You can pick up their album on Joyful Noise’s website.

Video game music! A dude going by the name of Space Quest Historian has been remixing and reworking the soundtracks to the Space Quest video games by Sierra. He already did a limited release of the Space Quest IV soundtrack, and now he’s prepping his Space Quest III reworking. It’ll get a vinyl release eventually, but as of right now you can pick up a digital copy at your own price. For fans of the series, I highly recommend it.

Since I can’t go to record stores at the moment, I’ve been ordering some new releases on Amazon right now. I got the soundtrack to Link’s Awakening, which includes both the music to the original Game Boy release and the Switch remake, but I haven’t gotten around to listening to it yet. I have been listening to the new Early Years box set by Def Leppard and do enjoy that. Some good live and rare stuff on there from back when the band was more of a heavy metal group and Joe Elliot was not a good (but very energetic) vocalist.

I’m also still on my stupid old synthesizer album kick, hopefully my boyfriend (who is cooped up with me and has to hear all this shit), doesn’t mind.

Barry Leng
This is Synthesizer Sound! (Complete Album Download)
There aren’t enough Barrys in music, am I right? John Barry doesn’t count. I’m talking about first name Barrys. We only got Barry Manilow. That’s it. You don’t hear a lot of “give it up for Barry on guitars!” at concerts. Women aren’t lusting after hot lead singers named Barry. No up-and-coming Soundcloud rappers go by Barry. .

The only other Barry I can name-check in music is Barry DeVorzon. He did the fantastic score to the 1979 all-time banger classic movie The Warriors. So I guess he’d have to be my all-time number one Barry in music.

Coming in behind at number two (of two) is Barry Leng, thanks to his 1978 collection of synthesizer pop song covers, This is Synthesizer Sound! The exclamation point is in the title. I do enjoy this album, but I’m not that excited about it.

Far as I can gather, this album was released in Japan only. But many of the songs on it were on a 1974 album called
Golden Hour Of Golden Instrumental Hits Featuring The Many Moogs Of Killer Watts. As great as the name Barry Leng is, I’m going to have to say that “Killer Watts” is even better, wonder why he didn’t stick with that.

The fact that it was first released in 1974 didn’t surprise me. By 1978, the synthesizer album market was drying up, save for Japan, where they kept pumping them out until they just morphed into synthpop records. As synth albums of the mid-70s go, this one feels much more acoustic than others. A lot of the drums are acoustic, and it also features guitar and other instruments. I don’t know who’s playing those instruments, as no liner notes, English or otherwise, are included with the album. maybe Barry was a virtuoso.

He certainly was an accomplished producer. In the 1970, Barry pumped out a steady supply of mid-level disco and soft rock before striking it big in 1978, producing Amii Stewart’s hit cover of “Knock On Wood.” He would then go on to chart on the European charts some more as a producer for dance acts E’voke and Rage. It looks like he hasn’t done anything since the mid-90s though, if his Discogs credits are any indication. Hey Barry, you still out there? What are you up to?

As I said, this isn’t really entirely a synthesizer album, it’s more of a hybrid that mixes synths and more traditional instruments. It’s not the best record of its type, but I think what it lacks in originality it makes up for with production (ti sounds great) and a stellar tracklist. We get a great cover of the theme to For A Few Dollars More, a nice take on the Godfather love theme, and dope covers of “Apache,” “Help” and “Live and Let Die,” just to name a few. It also has a fantastic rendition of “Telstar,” which I’ve already mentioned is one of my favorite instrumentals of all time. Barry does it justice with his version here. I also have to call out the version of “Help.” The synthesizer work isn’t all that remarkable, but the drumming is fantastic. Ditto for “Hey Jude.” I hate “Hey Jude” but I love dope drums and this version has them in spades. The best track in terms of pure synth work is “Soul Coaxing” (google it, you know it). Very ethereal with lots of groovy pitch-bending sounds.

The album also has a cover of “Red River Rock,” another song that you definitely know even if you don’t know the name. You probably heard it on the soundtrack to Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The version on that was recorded by early synthpop act Silicon Teens. I wonder if they somehow came across Barry’s version and were inspired to create their own rendition because of it. Seems like a hell of a coincidence that two different synthesizer-based acts would decide to cover the same song so close together without one inspiring the other.

Fun music for not-so-fun times. Pipe it up loud and drown out the existential dread the best you can.

Posted in Complete Albums | 11 Comments »

From the turntables of Lesbos

Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

 

Nights Of Love In Lesbos
Side 1
Side 2
This is a stupid record and I own it because I’m a stupid person who buys stupid things stupidly.

Released in 1962 by Fax Records, Nights Of Love In Lesbos, promises “a frankly intimate description of a sensuous young girl’s lesbian desires.” In actuality, it is little more than a very abridged and slightly more ribald reading of Pierre Louÿs’ Songs of Bilitis, a rather well-known piece of lesbian erotica from the 1890s that Louÿs attempted to pass off as legit historical texts that he discovered and translated. He later was exposed as a fraud, but people still held the works in high regard because I guess French people of the late 1800s were really into reading about lesbians.

I have not read Songs of Bilitis in its entirety. My gay ass is not the target market I suppose. But in glancing over it, I found that this record took several extreme liberties with the source material. Male characters from the poem are excised entirely, with entire sections not related to lesbian lovemaking are torn out as well because, well, why bother with them I suppose. The erotic aspects are changed also. Whoever wrote this abridged version was very much a boob man. Boobs abound here. The narrator talks about her own breasts, the breasts of her lovers, how men are inferior because they don’t have breasts, and so on. It feels like it was written buy a guy who assumes lesbians just look in a mirror all day and get turned on by their own tits. However, while this record is all about the boobs, anything below the waist is strictly off limits. Even words like “loins” are removed. I guess they wanted to be better safe than sorry in case the law came after them.

When the time comes for the record to get down and dirty with tales of sapphic deeds, descriptions are so flowery and peppered with metaphor that a casual listener might pass over them without actually understanding what’s going on. The most explicit sexual act I could find on this album was this line: “sometimes she makes me kneel and place my hands on the bed…then she slips her little head underneath and imitates the trembling kid which sucks from the belly of its mother.” That has to be the most unerotic description of oral sex I’ve ever heard. There’s also a reference to lips opening but that might just be my pervy ass reading too much into things.

The only credit on this record is for the narrator, performing under the mononymous pseudonym “Ilona.” No one is credited with adapting the original text, and all production work is left uncredited as well. Obviously, the people who worked on the record were either too ashamed to be named, or too worried that they might face charges for obscenity.

As stupid as this record is, I think it’s an interesting historical document that showcases what passed for “scandalous” before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and it’s a real shame that the stories behind it, and the countless records like it, are lost to time. If there is any information about the production of these records online, it’s very hard to find. Most searches for “fax records” turn up auction listings, blogs like this, or pages by dudes who collect pin-up art. If anyone out there does know any actual information about how records like this were produced and/or sold, hit me up in the comments!

I hope this softcore tale of lesbian lust helps you during these trying times. And a reminder, if you need further distractions from our virus-enduced hellscape, I have a new podcast where I talk about prog with Jeremy Parish and Elliot Long. You can check that out here.

Take care of yourselves and stay safe.

Posted in Complete Albums | 3 Comments »

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