Features

Continuing our multi-part exploration of Japanese synthpop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), this week we’ll analyze Yukihiro Takahashi, Haruomi Hosono, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s solo LPs and side projects from 1980-1982. For brevity’s sake, we’ll exclude the artists’ production work for other acts, focusing only on Takahashi, Hosono, Sakamoto, and Hideki Matsutake-led projects (apologies to fans of Kenji Omura’s Spring Is Nearly Here). In addition, releases only reviewed digitally here won’t feature sound scores. Below are links to this series’ previous features:

This week, AnalogPlanet begins a multi-part exploration of Japanese synthpop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). Through reviews of their core releases and YMO-era side projects, we’ll dissect how, by incorporating elements of exotica, video game music, musique concrete, and more, the trio of Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Ryuichi Sakamoto transformed electronic music. They gained massive success in Japan but are also credited for influencing hip-hop and Detroit techno. First, however, we’ll explore the individual members’ pre-YMO work.

In June 2020, Analog Planet published my article on the great audio engineer, David Jones’ Living Legends Riverside recordings of Black Traditional Jazz in New Orleans during the last week of January 1961. While researching the article, by checking records in my collection I compiled a list of Riverside albums for which Jones had been credited or co-credited as engineer.

Etta James was in the heartbreak business. Other singers sold sweet dreams of love, romance, and sex, but Etta James sold pain and she had an endless supply. The pain started early. She never knew who her father was. When she was born, her mother who was fourteen, abandoned her, leaving her with a childless older couple. The woman, called “Mama Lu” by Etta, became her surrogate mother, and she was loved and spoiled by her and they lived happily. But not ever after, because all was not well and never would be. Periodically, her birth mother, Dorothy, who loved the night life, would appear and take the child away. It was always the same. They would live in squalor until a few weeks passed and then, bored and frustrated with parenthood, Dorothy would return Etta to Mama Lu. The pattern continued until Etta was twelve when Mama Lu died. Dorothy appeared, told Etta that she would be living with her now, and took her to San Francisco. There, Dorothy met her brother on a street corner, left Etta with him, and walked away.

Classic Records Founder Mike Hobson and Acoustic Sounds/Analogue Productions/QRP Founder Chad Kassem reminisce about the "old days", and the beginnings of Classic Records, which in 1993 when almost no one was making vinyl, decided to manufacture great records—and maybe even sell a few.

When Chet Baker died in 1988, he wasn’t an icon of “cool,” he was a has-been. The biopic with the Hollywood star and the consistent ranking among the top-selling jazz CDs on Amazon was far in the future and long after he was gone. The New York Times obit was perfunctory, misstated his age, and devoted two sentences to his career post-1950s. Baker, in the 1980s, had been the same unrepentant, narco-ssistic junkie mess that he had been since the mid 1950s, but he was working in Europe, playing mostly small clubs, driving from gig to gig, and sleeping on couches instead of the way it had been in the ’50s in the U.S.—playing concert tours, fielding movie offers, topping the jazz polls and charts, his popularity making even Miles Davis jealous.