Revisit Two Mixtapes of Rare and Experimental Japanese Music
"OMG JAPAN" indeed
As we get set to properly launch the Substack edition of self-titled, we’re celebrating some of our favorite stories from the past 16 years.
Today’s newsletter is a long overdue look back at Jen Monroe’s two-part ‘OMG JAPAN’ series of rare and experimental ‘80s records from Ryuichi Sakamoto, Inoyama Land, Junko Yagami, Miharu Koshi, Mami Koyama and more.
While Monroe is now widely known as the visionary chef / artist behind the food design firm Bad Taste, she was busy making us believe in MP3 blogs again back in 2015. That’s when the Listen To This founder asked if we’d like to share her loving tribute to the kind of cutting-edge Japanese music that’d soon be lionized by the likes of Light in the Attic.
‘OMG JAPAN’ remains one of our best-performing mixtapes for a reason — because the Bryan Sweeney collab sounds like a secret cut to a Memorex cassette tape. Have a listen and a look at Monroe’s liner notes below. We’ve also dropped a newly downloadable edition of ‘OMG JAPAN 2’ right underneath it.
Why? Because we love you.
The diversity of Japanese pop in the 1980s is astounding. Something magic happened; whether it was the sudden glut of Western culture after Japan’s strict isolation, the economic boom, the sudden availability of synthesizers, or a Japanese proclivity towards razor-sharp musicianship, the ’80s were a singular time for Japanese music.
At the heart of the explosion was one of the most influential electronic music acts of all time, Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their music is usually described as technopop, but Yukihiro Takahashi, Haruomi Hosono, and Ryuichi Sakamoto were all deft genre-benders, both as a group and as solo artists. They experimented with folk, funk, house, electro, disco, hard techno, new wave, exotica, surf pop, and Indian synth ragas.
Unsurprisingly, the three left their fingerprints on all the best music that was made in Japan at the time. In assembling this mix, we found that almost everything we loved was one degree removed from YMO, be it through their production, songwriting, an instrumental cameo, a collaboration, or their imprint, ¥EN Records.
This is a mix of Japanese pop songs, most of them with a synth funk backbone. The most exciting aspect of this era of music, though, is how unafraid these musicians were to push the limits of genre: They loved Van Dyke Parks, Kraftwerk and Martin Denny, but they were never confined by any one sound, nor were they afraid to poke fun at Western constructs of the “oriental” or Japanese fascinations with Western cultural novelties.
Track two of this mix, Miharu Koshi’s “L’amour…Aruiwa Kuro No Irony” (yes, a tri-lingual song title) is built around a funk bass line, but sitting on top is a looping sample of a woman panting, rattling synth textures, layers of Koshi’s airy vocals, and a sample of what might be an Indian electric banjo. Colored Music’s “Heartbeat” sounds like a cassette that got melted in the sun, with a faraway pirate chant and agitated house beat shredded in half by an almost unlistenable piano meltdown.
Minako Yoshida’s “Tornado” is a showcase of achingly clever songwriting and wicked funk musicianship wrapped in a delicate marimba gauze. Sandii’s “Zoot Kook” is a warped, lush, slo-mo rollerskate disco track. Elsewhere, we hear traditional Japanese drumming, jungly synth washes, oil-slicked city-pop, an orchestra, and new wave guitar, often stacked together in skewed ways with a sly sense of humor.
We hope that the recent resurgence of interest in this era will continue, and that more reissues will push these artists to become household names outside of Japan. The candy-coated appeal of these songs can’t deflect from their progressive (and often deeply subversive) nature, and their importance in the global musical dialogue.
TRACKLISTING:
Chiemi Manabe – Untotooku
Miharu Koshi – L’amour…Ariuwa Kuro No Irony
Hiroshi Satoh – Say Goodbye
Colored Music – Heartbeat
Minako Yoshida – Tornado
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Kacha Kucha Nee
Mariah – Shinzo No Tobira
Yukihiro Takahashi – Drip Dry Eyes
Sandii – Zoot Kook
Haruomi Hosono – Ohenro-San
Osamu Shoji – Jinkou Station Ceres
Neo-Plant – Kisagari Koharu
Inoyama Land – Wässer
Aragon – Horridula
Asami Kado – Kagami No Naka No Zyugatsu
Tamao Koike & Haruomi Hosono – Automne Dans Un Miroir
Hiroyuki Namba – Hiru No Yume
As we first explored in the inaugural volume of Listen To This’ OMG JAPAN series a couple years back, few scenes have shaped contemporary electronic music as much as Japan in the 1980’s. Synth-pop and its offshoots — city pop, electro-pop, and techno kaya, among others — were particularly at the forefront of the conversation, enabled both by an increased availability of relatively affordable synthesizers and a culture of musical curiosity.
Genres mutated in a way that was largely unprecedented at the time, and the members of Yellow Magic Orchestra (Yukihiro Takahashi, Haruomi Hosono, and Ryuichi Sakamoto) were at the center of the shift. The group’s influence has been enormous, so much so that it’s impossible to trace in a straight line: Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, The Orb, David Sylvian, 808 State, and Afrika Bambaataa have all cited YMO as a major inspiration for their work.
Just as compelling as the music others made in response to Japanese synth pop, though, were the conversations that Japanese musicians had with each other, often in response to imported sounds. After all, YMO’s breakout single was a synth reinterpretation of Martin Denny’s “Firecracker,” a favorite piece from the father of exotica and a soundtrack of 1959 suburban fantasy-fueled Orientalism.
That interest in playing with conceptions of “Japanese-ness” shows up all over the Japanese pop canon, not just in the work of the members of YMO. On this mix, you can hear it most palpably on dip in the pool’s sparse and sprawling “Rabo Del Sol,” whose heavy, ceremonious drum and bell syncopation suggests traditional taiko, revisited with a medieval-futurist sensibility.
That proclivity towards inventive genre splicing is all over this mix, actually, perhaps most noticeably as a reggae influence in three very different incarnations.
First, Akiko Yano’s steel drum-flecked synth-reggae cupcake “Ashkenazy Who?” is replete with gleefully gnashed vocals, twisted and slung in the mouth as if to mimic warped synth pulses.
Next, Junko Yagami leans even more explicitly into reggae fusion on “ジョハナスバーグ” (“Zyohanasubargu,” i.e. a Romanization of the Japanese pronunciation of Johannesburg), a thick synth-funk ode to a global love for reggae, winking with drum machines and synthetic accordian.
Last is Pecqre’s “Kylyln,” a spaced-out dub rendition of a song originally written by Ryuichi Sakamoto for Kazumi Watanabe, which comes from one of the most slept-on records in the Japanese canon. It was largely recorded in Jamaica at Channel One and Tuff Gong Studio on a trip organized by Bob Marley himself, as the story goes, at the urging of drummer and diehard reggae fan Masahito Hashido (aka Pecqre). It’s an incredible lineup: between Aston Barrett and Robbie Shakespeare on bass, Carly Barrett and Sly Dunbar on percussion, Minako Yoshida’s lead vocals, and Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt singing back-up, one can only dream of being a fly on the wall during those sessions.
Elsewhere in genre-bending is the supremely strange and wonderful “Down? Down, Down!” / “Stay Outta My World,” from Mariah vocalist Jimmy Murakawa, which, between its cavernous metallic clanging, creeping synth lines, and echoey muttering, feels more German industrial than Japanese. But by the song’s conclusion, it’s somehow morphed into a slinking hip-hop bass line with reverb hand-claps and sinister kiss-off lyrics to match, sounding uncannily like an unfinished Notorious B.I.G. track. Mami Koyama’s “Love Song” is a stunning piece of hypnagogic ambient pop punctuated by smoky swirls of koto, hyper-polished both in its opiated production and futuristic use of dimensional space.
Pizzicato V’s cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” is, for all its cheekiness, a gorgeous lounge-pop precursor to the Shibuya-kei sound that the group would go on to make famous in the ’90s. Ayuo Takahashi’s “流れる” sounds like top-tier, private press, cosmic New Age, except it’s by way of an avant-garde child prodigy-turned-early music scholar in collaboration with Koharu Kisaragi, a playwright and experimental theater figure (who, incidentally, makes an appearance in OMG JAPAN Volume 1 as well).
It’s generous music, and the rabbithole seems to go on forever, so it’s not surprising that it attracts obsessive record collectors. While a resurgence of interest has brought about a stream of exciting reissues, there are still countless incredible records that have yet to be distributed outside of Japan — so happy digging, and happy listening!
TRACKLISTING:
1. Tabo’s Project – Feel
2. Imitation – Narcisa
3. Jimmy Murakawa – Down? Down, Down! / Stay Outta My World
4. Zabadak – 蝶
5. Akiko Yano – Ashkenazy Who?
6. Junko Ohashi – I Love You So
7. Junko Yagami – Zyohanasubargu
8. Tatsuro Yamashita – Love Talkin’ (Honey It’s You)
9. Yukihiro Takahashi – Konchu-Ki
10. Sandii & The Sunsetz – The Serious Game
11. Pizzicato V – The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)
12. Pecqre – Kylyn
13. Joe Hisaishi – The Winter Requiem
14. dip in the pool – Rabo Del Sol
15. Masami Tsuchiya – Never Mind
16. Mami Koyama – Love Song
17. Toshifumi Hinata – サラズ・クライム
18. Ayuo Takahashi ft. Koharu Kisagari – 流れる
19. Hiroko Yakushimaru – 透明なチューリップ (Transparent Tulip)