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)
Really interesting - I've heard of the Yellow Magic Orchestra but never taken the time to get to know them, so these articles are my way in.
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