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? Try again...
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 so 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. For those last few perfect minutes of the commute, I rode bathed in light.
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