Assorted Gems: Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto

THOUSAND KNIVES OF RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (1978)

If I have my chronology right, Sakamoto made most of this album knowing he would be a part of Haruomi Hosono’s Yellow Magic Orchestra project. But he was a reluctant joinee, and I think the Yellow Magic Orchestra concept, as well as the solidification of the membership, preceded the recording of their debut album by some time. Sakamoto’s daily reality across those few months of 1978 was that of a full-time session musician (and, come to think of it, I’m not sure his membership in YMO would have felt very different, to start with). It was his dissatisfaction with the work that spurred him to work as hard as he did on his solo debut. Wikipedia says he clocked 339 hours in (mostly in the middle of the night) before the album was done.

Here are sixteen reasons to love the record:

1. The title.

2. The vocoder intro to the title track. I’ve always loved the two A New Machine interludes on Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Here you have the same idea and spirit a decade in advance. But where Gilmour’s words come through clearly, no one would recognize this as a Mao Zedong poem — no one would even recognize it as Mandarin Chinese, I think. And now that I think about it, I wonder whose idea it was to include so much French (and Italian, on Kimi ni Mune Kyun) on Yellow Magic Orchestra records. Takahashi's own '78 solo debut album, Saravah!, had French influences; plus the first-ever appearance of The Voice comes on Takahashi's song, La Femme Chinoise. Hosono is the one who kept the tradition going, on Miharu Koshi records. And Sakamoto was the first to have this “Well, clearly someone is talking, but hell if I know what they are saying” thing going on.

3. Hosono’s guest spot on Thousand Knives — he’s playing finger cymbals... knowing Hosono’s sense of humor, I thought he’d do one clink for the bragging rights, but he’s audible, if not prominent, for quite a long stretch.

4. The return of the vocoder in Das Neue Japanische Elektronische Volkslied. It arrives in the bridge, but towards the end it sneaks into the song’s main part too, sounding as lonely, cold, and strange as it did in Thousand Knives. It’s like a clammy hand reaching out from the pond and grabbing your ankle, as you sit eating your sandwich, listening to the early evening birdsong, watching the last of the sunlight glimmering between tree trunks.

5. Kazumi Watanabe’s guitar solos. They sounded like jazzy wankery to me at first. “Ah, so this is what the ‘fusion’ genre sounds like?” But since I couldn’t resist Thousand Knives’ digital, reggae-adjacent groove, I heard those solos many more times, and one bright autumn day the first of the two got catapulted into my list of favorite guitar solos. The tone pierces the instrumental blend (which, for its own part, turns spare to give it space — at first, but then subtly reclaims its own as familiar melodies come back in, but softly) and the solo itself is insane. My favorite moment is around 4:40, when Watanabe shifts the rhythm. The solo in The End of Asia is less striking on a melodic level, but — as a student in my elective class put it — it barrels into and against that East Asian-sounding melody like a bullet train through the Chinese countryside.

6. The waves of melody in Island of Woods. Most of the song is in the “concrete music” vein of Malabar Hotel rather than the lush melodicism of Paraiso (Sakamoto played synths on both records) but here and there, when you don’t expect it, the melodies come: like a gust of wind, or an arrow of migrating birds; they linger for a bit, they’re gone.

7. Grasshoppers. It’s almost my favorite song on the album. It’s so beautiful that I tend to get stuck at the end of Side A, replaying it five times before I move on. What do you call the time signature of the main riff? It’s 5/4 but with an extra beat at the end, which allows a moment sometimes for breath and sometimes for those lovely triplets — so that’s six beats, but you couldn’t waltz to the song. And the leisurely middle section, which sounds nowhere near as catchy as the opening/closing riff, actually turns out to be just as catchy, once you get used to its long, barely-repeating melody lines.

8. The hundred-plus-note synth riff in Das Neue Japanische Elektronische Volkslied. Yes, hundred-plus. It starts off sounding like a simple and catchy fourteen-note riff, but if you follow it closely, you’ll realize that at its second iteration, Sakamoto takes it somewhere different, and then just keeps going, and going, and going... I've been meaning to learn it for months now, daunting as it seems. What better and more satisfying warm-up exercise could there be for a basic “two-finger keyboardist” like me?

9. The wooden-clacker percussion thing (Tatsuro Yamashita’s castanets?) that comes in at 2:10 of Das Neue Japanische Elektronische Volkslied. The riff made this my favorite song on the album on first listen, but this element of the percussion, once I caught on to what it's doing, cemented it there. The song is in 4/4; in the first measure, the clacker falls on the first and fourth beats, and in the second measure, on the third. Talk about wonderfully perverse.

10. The ridiculous bass and ...beatboxing? sounds in Plastic Bamboo. Anybody who’s only familiar with the serious-faced, classical-minded Sakamoto of his later years should listen to Plastic Bamboo and War Head.

11. The atmospheric B-sections of Plastic Bamboo, which sound like a direct reference for Chasing the Black-Caped Man in the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack.

12. The ambient final minute of Plastic Bamboo: didn’t see that coming, did you?

13. The “lonely kung fu master striving to perfect his art even in this decadent modern era” stylings of The End of Asia.

14. The adaptation of Chinese Communist anthem The East is Red, with which Sakamoto closes the album. Xoo Multiplies ends with it too. There’s a revolutionary-Communist themed noodle restaurant here in Xiamen that plays a few gentle folk arrangement of ‘50s classics on loop. I eat there a lot and must have heard The East is Red three hundred times. I didn’t recognize it — Sakamoto changed parts of the tune — but if you listen to one after the other, you’ll notice the similarity. It’s good sequencing: Thousand Knives opens with the Mao poem, The End of Asia closes with The East Is Red. Also, Thousand Knives and The End of Asia have the only guitar solos.

15. The context that the album gives to Tong Poo. After you get to know this record well, Tong Poo comes to sound like an epic outtake from its sessions. The structure is like Grasshoppers, two iterations of a supremely catchy melody bookending a long, strange, mesmerizing jam. 

15. The fucking front cover! Possibly even better than the album itself. None other than Yukihiro OTM Takahashi picked out Ryuichi's suit.

(Back to: A Personal Canon)

Translation: Lotus Love (Yellow Magic Orchestra)

The general arc of Yellow Magic Orchestra's discography looks something like this:


1978 - Yellow Magic Orchestra (the "electronic exotica" project as originally conceived; practically a Hosono solo album)

1979 - Solid State Survivor (a sister album to the above, featuring more Sakamoto and Takahashi songs)

1980 - X∞Multiplies (huge left turn)

1981 - BGM (huge left turn)

1981 - Technodelic (a sister album to the above)

1983 - Naughty Boys (huge left turn)

1983 - Service (a sister album to the above)

1992 - Technodon (huge left turn)


...which suggests that, if they'd made a follow-up to Technodon shortly thereafter, it would have been a sister album. (X∞Multiplies, the apparent outlier, has a sister album too, but it's a Takahashi solo record, 1980's Murdered by the Music.)

The crazy left turns are part of what make exploring the band's catalogue so fun. It's hard to imagine the band's debut if you're coming off of Hosono's Tropical Trilogy like I was. Neither Solid State Survivor nor X∞Multiplies would lead you to expect anything like BGM. And Naughty Boys is probably the greatest blast of all.

It was, in fact, a conscious effort to self-combust. "You know what? Instead of being experimental and trend-setting this time, let's just make a dumb J-pop record that adheres to all the trends. Let's eat ourselves." It wouldn't have been made at all (oh frightening thought) if their record label, Alfa, hadn't twisted their arm. And then Naughty Boys was such a hit that they had to make another, which they named Service: like, fanservice.

The point of all this is that Lotus Love, Hosono's song, is the only thing on Naughty Boys in which you might recognize the Yellow Magic Orchestra from two years before. It has that weird, off-kilter, spiritual vibe; for this one song alone, they allowed half a hand to stray back into that BGM/Technodelic darkness...

...but lyrically it's resplendent.



:::



A feeling that never changes,
eternally returning and reverberating:
I love you.
Petals in the inner corner of my eye,
the usual incantation in my throat:
I love you.

Baby, come leap through time!
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.

Sitting in the dusk.
Words that not a soul can see:
I love you.
The moment you notice me,
I become like snow, melting in sunlight:
you love me.

Baby, come leap through time!
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.

An incantation surreptitiously grazing
a mouth seen briefly, in a dream:
love, love, love.

Baby, come leap through time!
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.
Baby, let's go meet outside the world.

(Back to: List of Translations)

Assorted Gems: Cochin Moon

HARUOMI HOSONO & TADANORI YOKOO - COCHIN MOON (1978)

I’m teaching a Yellow Magic Orchestra seminar at the uni this term. Normally, I would hope that “presiding over” will eventually become a more accurate descriptor than “teaching,” but I don’t know if it will this time. Nearly everyone who signed up is as introverted as me. 

We’re going over one album a week, moving chronologically, if selectively: fourteen albums from Paraiso to Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo. The students have to write a 1500-character essay (Chinese characters, that is) about each record. It isn’t fair to ask them to do something I wouldn’t do myself, so I’m trying to keep up.

During the class yesterday evening, I turned the lights off and played Side A of Cochin Moon, the Hotel Malabar suite, through a little Sony portable speaker — not the best sound quality (such weak bass, which when you’re playing a Hosono record amounts to sacrilege) but serviceable: the sound filled the room and the song felt huge. 

It’s been ten years since I was last at a concert, and at concerts the sound is often, if for the band’s own good purposes, too loud, isn’t it? (And when it isn’t, things can be miserable, like the one Radiohead show I got to see — when they were touring my favorite of their albums, no less — The King of Limbs.) My wife doesn’t share my music taste so I rarely play anything through a speaker at home, and anyway at home there are always distractions. 

But to sit in the dark, in a plainly furnished classroom, with a bunch of near-strangers (so no one’s going to begin chatting), at night, and just listen — that’s really something.

I must’ve heard Cochin Moon forty or fifty times before last night, but hearing Hotel Malabar this way, it felt like there were entire sections I’d never heard before. I like to think that, when I listen to music, I pay pretty close attention. But most of my listening gets done when I’m biking to work, or doing housework. Whole minutes get sucked into whirlpools: I'm biking along, my mind on the music, when somebody appears ahead, so I need to focus on that, or else I get distracted by the birds taking off over the bay, or there’s some particularly oily pot in among the dishes, and one distracted thought leads to another, and next thing I know, two or three minutes have gone by in which I haven’t really registered what I’m hearing.

Then there were the sections that did feel very familiar, but this time, listening in the dark, I was disorientingly clueless as to how long they would last. I knew which part would come next — it’s a twenty-minute song, but there are a lot of changes along the way, small and big — the goofy synth-bass solo, the long burst of TV-feedback, the disconnected voices, all kinds of synthy variations and melody lines — and yet there were times yesterday when I sat there listening to the loops or ambient interludes and found myself thinking, “No way, this is still happening? It was never this long before!” — and not in a bad way. 

In an essay from the late ‘90s, Hosono writes that, when they were in India together in ‘78, Tadanori Yokoo persuaded him to try and summon UFOs together. They would step outdoors in the dark of night and send their signals upward. It was not until after they were through with a horrible weeklong bout of dysentery (so bad that they both began to wonder whether they’d make it out of India alive... though actually, getting dysentery was apparently the primary reason Hosono went; Yokoo had gotten sick on a previous trip too and described the experience as a spiritual cleansing as well as a physical one), not until after the Madam Consul General of Madras had healed them both through a combination of her mighty supernatural capacities and some good-old down-home Japanese cooking (Yokoo in his autobiograpy: "The consul seemed to be frightened by something, but the consul's wife was like a bodhisattva. She'd had all kinds of incredible supernatural experiences") that they actually did, successfully, call one over. It changed Hosono’s life. 

But first they spent a long while trying and failing. And listening to Hotel Malabar yesterday, marveling at how long that repetitive, cycling rhythmic section of the Upper Floor segment actually is, those failed attempts came to mind. The music sounds like two seekers standing on a beach in South India, or out in the roof garden of their hotel, sending one signal after another up into the night. No answer? Try again. No answer? Try again. No answer? Well...

Another thing that became clear yesterday was that Side A is not pop music. It gives exactly zero fucks about you staying interested. Pop music, generally speaking, wants to grab your attention and hold it; this song doesn’t. You have to approach Hotel Malabar on its terms. Either you give yourself over completely and trust that Hosono is in fact doing something awesome, however weird or unnerving or cold — or you get distracted and end up missing beautiful things. 

Another great thing about yesterday's listen was realizing that, although Hotel Malabar is divided into three segments, each with two distinct subtitles (so, quite a conceptual set-up... by the way, all these mentions of triangles — the Triangle Circuit on the Sea Forest, and a Moving Triangle? exactly how many tracks are there on each side of Cochin Moon? — cool, huh? But the insight doesn't originate with me, all credit to Li Jiahao), it really is just one long song. I don’t say that merely because there’s no break in the music. It’s that the segment divisions feel arbitrary, sonically speaking: for all the times I’d heard the album before, I could not have told you, as I listened last night, “Okay, right here is where Upper Floor begins,” or, “All right, here we go: Roof Garden!” 

I called Hotel Malabar a suite, above, but it isn’t. Side B of YMO’s debut: now that’s a suite. Hotel Malabar is as much a single entity as Richard Dawson’s The Hermit.

I used to find Hotel Malabar too abstract. Interesting, yes, but I preferred the pop experiments on Side B. I still adore Side B — it’s so easy to love, it sucks you right in with that gurgling “aww shit, here comes the next round of diarrhea” sound effect — plus Madam Consul General is just insane (and ten minutes long!) (and so is Hum Ghar Sajan, what the hell! I always thought it lasted four or five minutes tops) — but I think last night was the final stage of Side A’s coup d’etat.

The sides are so stylistically distinct that Hosono credited the songwriting on Side B to a nom-de-plume. Side B is the pop side. It’s still pretty weird (this is a Hosono record, what do you want) and it doesn’t exactly make concessions to the listener, but it’s catchy and melodic, with clear and prominent rhythms. Listen to the incredible opening minute of Hepatitis: there’s only one spare, sporadic beat (it's not even there, to start with) and one solitary melody line, but you catch the rhythm right away.

Side A is dark, and Side B’s opener, Hepatitis, while fun and goofy, is still on the oppressive side. A few students compared it to a virus running rampant in a human host: it's the background music the virus hears as it goes about wreaking havoc. But the next song, Hum Ghar Sajan, is something else, something ecstatic and bright. One of the things Hosono does well is remind you how ecstatic, how saturated with light, life is — or can be, when everything is okay — or better than okay, rather, because it’s elevated joy and enlightenment that Hosono tends to deal in. He’s got a late song called Miracle Light. That’s what his music is; or, that’s what it’s been to me.

So -- one morning last week, I was listening to Cochin Moon on my bike ride to work. I’d woken before dawn. The sun was up when I got outside, but stuck behind a curtain of clouds. Then, as Hum Ghar Sajan was beginning — as its high, happy, peaceful melodies escaped from behind their own veils of mist — the clouds parted and the sun blazed forth. The song played on. I bathed in light.

(Back to: A Personal Canon)

Assorted Gems: Paraiso

HARRY HOSONO AND THE YELLOW MAGIC BAND - PARAISO  (1978)

One nice thing about being a westerner getting into Haruomi Hosono is the lack of context. There isn’t much available in English. Apparently there are some interviews and contextual bits in the Light in the Attic reissues of certain albums, including this one, but I don’t have access to those. Generally, all you can do is listen to the music and imagine the rest for yourself. 

It was a surprise to watch the “No Smoking” Hosono documentary (with Chinese subtitles) and learn that Hosono felt Paraiso was an artistic step back from the heights of Tropical Dandy and Bon Voyage Co. Those, he says, were made under the influence of the amazing music he was just then discovering. But no vine of inspiration can give fruit forever, and Paraiso was made in the wake of its wilting. He felt himself bogging down in something... and ended up taking a legendary trip to India with his friend Yokoo Tadanori — India, where Hosono contracted the dysentery that he believed would amount to a spiritual cleansing as well as a physical one but which, once he’d contracted it, he thought would kill him; India, where he saw his first UFO; India, out of which came his next album, Cochin Moon.

The funny thing is, listening to Paraiso, you’d never guess that it is a more desolate or somehow less inspired affair than the first two installments of what people came to call the Tropical Trilogy. It’s as fiercely colorful as the two before it. The Hiroshi Sato / Ryuichi Sakamoto piano/keyboard/synth team meeting the Tin Pan Alley family makes for an outrageous and beautiful sound. There are plenty of very happy songs. Can someone listen to Tokyo Rush and not smile? How many listens does it take before Asatoya Yunta starts melting any listener down into delighted goo? And is Worry Beads not one of the most uplifting songs ever written?

But now that I’ve got done translating the lyrics of the Tropical Trilogy into English, one difference does become clear.

Lyrically, the whole affair started with a burst of longing: Nettaiya (Sultry Night) on Tropical Dandy, a drifty city blues about wishing you were on a beach in Trinidad. At first Hosono thought he’d arrange it like a song by The Band, thus carrying on with the spirit of his first solo album, Hosono House; but a chain of events led him to recast himself as Harry “The Crown” Hosono, the white-suited and mustachioed Tropical Dandy himself. The remaining songs on Dandy were full of whimsy and fantasy: about being a kung-fu hero pursuing a rival across the desert; or a castaway who believes he sees his hometown beneath the waves as he poles his raft along; another that’s sort of about being a member of the moon race, vacationing on earth... 

Bon Voyage Co kept things light and playful too, for the most part. On both albums, the darkest that things get is in bright-sounding songs with lyrics about animals destined for slaughter: a soon-to-be Peking Duck on Tropical Dandy, and on Bon Voyage Co, a dog who thinks little of the fact that, come dawn, he’ll be butchered for food. Bon Voyage Co also has Hong Kong Blues, with the opium addiction and the exile from East Asia; but that’s a cover tune.

Bon Voyage Co ends with a song (Exotica Lullaby) in which, to comfort a grieving partner, but probably also to comfort himself, the narrator gazes up at the moon and tells of the gondola he sees drifting up there in that sea of light. The album’s final line of lyrics is, “Let’s get on,” and after it’s sung, the cheerful reggae rhythm gives way to an ambient outro, Hosono falsettoing along, as the song’s two characters get on board and sail up and away from the sad realms of earth...

All through Paraiso, we’re deep inside the longing that the Exotica Lullaby characters are able to jump out of. In the title track of this album, the narrator is left waiting at the pier, aware that, try as he might, and desire it as he might, he won’t manage to make the jump; the boat won’t come. Or if it does, it’ll be in that gray and distant “someday” of Paraiso’s closing verse, and in the future tense of its amazing chorus:

       From the pier, I'll leap aboard a ship hailing from a distant land —
       adios, farewell! —
       and blow a kiss to the lights of the city,
       gazing at them as I would a woman's face...

The lights of the city: of Tokyo, of course — which is to say, we’re back where we began with Tokyo Rush. But in the opener, the narrator emphasized the trips out — to Honolulu, and, wonderfully, Hong Kong (of all the places to go when one needs a break from high-speed urban livin’) — while the narrator in Paraiso admits, with resignation, that he’ll probably stay forever — “I could get used to living here, if I had to...”

Even the pier where he waits for this ship that will, supposedly, someday come pick him up, can only be reached in dreams. The second verse makes explicit that the paradise of the album’s title is a mirage. The band can travel there, sure enough, on Sakamoto’s insane synthesizer blast, but then it all melts away and we’re back inside the same gentle rhythm and sway. Never mind the talk of paradise, it’s time to grow old.

If you re-examine the album in the light of its closer, you notice other things.

Shimendoka, taken on its own, is as hopeful and energizing as songs get, Hosono dismissing the demons that roam the road to holiness in chorus after chorus. “The way may be full of flowers or it may be full of storms. It doesn’t matter. I’m going.” But if you think about Paraiso and the ship that never comes (no matter how many languages the narrator says “goodbye” in), you may notice that each verse in Shimendoka starts with a conditional: “In the morning, I’ll set out.” “When the flowers are in bloom, I’ll set out.” “When the winds come blowing, I’ll set out.” “And when night falls, I’ll arrive.” All “when [A] / I’ll [B]” formulations. Strictly speaking, the narrator hasn’t gone anywhere. He feels ready to get moving, but it doesn’t mean he’s moving.

The gamelan meets drum machine instrumental, Shambhala Signal, makes me think of a pilgrim up on some lonesome mountain road, who suddenly hears the strains of a song: music from Shambhala, the holy city, whose people are calling him: “This is the end of your travels, you’ve found us, we’re here! Come!” The music sounds like it’s emerging from just behind the next rise, or from between the trees, or behind them, somewhere closeby, the entrance to the city is near: but he can’t seem to find it. The music speeds up towards the end because the gates are closing. “Quickly! Come quickly!” But he doesn’t make it, and the song's abrupt ending is like the gates slamming shut.

It's a fitting end to the Tropical Trilogy. If it’s Tokyo you need to get away from, sure, you can take that trip to Hawaii. But if it’s earthly sorrows you’re trying to leave behind, there’s nowhere physical you can go. Nettaiya’s Trinidad has to be a Trinidad of the heart: and so there’s Worry Beads, one of the most beautiful songs Hosono ever wrote, in which he asks us to accompany him to the deserts of the moon (to return there, specifically, which makes me think he might be talking about childhood) so that we can plant the seeds of the desert inside our heart, so that they can bloom later, when we’re back in exile again. And when they do bloom, back on earth — as they will, the singer suggests, if instead of fighting and struggling to relieve your troubles and worries, you acknowledge them and count them and accept that they’re going to stick around, since after all, worry and suffering walk hand in hand with love (hence those beautiful lines, “The first bead for that child’s sake / The second bead for this child’s sake,” so mellifluous in Japanese) — well then, anything becomes possible, because (as Tolstoy phrased it) the kingdom of God is within you. “You can go anywhere, any place at all you can think of, you can go soon, you can go right away.”

In a sense, then, Worry Beads is the album closer. It’s the solution to the problem; or if not quite that, it’s the most spiritually profound moment in the trilogy. It fades out on the choir chanting along with Haruomi, “Om namah chandraya, shantih, shantih, chandraya,” (“a Sanskrit mantra dedicated to the Hindu god of the moon, Chandra, its repetition said to bring clarity, insight, perspective, and calm, especially in times of confusion and distress”), so many voices lifted alongside his — it reminds me of Richard Dawson gathering his friends to sing the outro of The Hermit with him, another great moment of divine light.

But, marvelously, Worry Beads isn’t the closer, Paraiso is. Paraiso is the return to reality, the comedown after the vision. Ordinary, earthly reality is what you have to live with for years and years, even — especially — when the seeds of a spiritual vision are planted in your heart. In Paraiso we have the human longing for escape from sorrow into paradise after all, a longing that persists even when you know for sure that you can't get there. 

Hosono describes the escape route for us, but it’s buried under so many layers: he has to be dreaming, first of all; he has to dream of that one particular fantasy, second; he has to stubbornly chase the fantasy until he reaches the pier, third; and fourth, even when he makes it all the way to the pier, he still needs to wait for the ship to come. But for all that — and for all his disarming resignation, the “tomorrow I’ll try and fail again” — each chorus is packed full of goodbyes, as if he were already leaving. “From the pier, I’ll leap aboard,” says the narrator. And blows the city — the vale of sorrow — a goodbye kiss.

The easygoing rhythm of the song belies the understated but urgent despair in the lyrics, and the resignation, the hope, the imagined joy.

I’ve barely mentioned the album's music. It's glorious — what else do you expect from Hosono? 

(Nic from Critter Jams has more to say about the music.)

(Back to: A Personal Canon)