RFI: Yellow Magic Orchestra

Side B of the debut is interesting to me since all 3 tunes do clearly go together but they were all written by different members. They never really did anything like that since. I think back then the band was just supposed to be a one-off on a sort of gimmicky concept so they were all going outside of their usual styles and clearly having a lot of fun with it. in YT's solo catalogue you'll hear songs like Nice Age or Ballet or Cue, but not La Femme Chinoise. nothing Hosono did really sounds like Mad Pierrot.

The After Service version of “La Femme Chinoise”

For my OPO

Taiso for me, but it's only a hair ahead of like 20 other songs of equal stature, imho.

The After Service version of “La Femme Chinoise”

Just heard this for the first time. Takahashi's vocals! Goes to show how far five years of constant singing can take you.

And both those Gradated Gray live takes are awesome. The guitar brightens the choruses up, which is pleasantly disorienting. I love how sedate both arrangements stay and how psychedelic both get, in their own ways. Great woozy piano-led outro in the Hosono version.

Taiso could go for fifteen minutes and still wouldn't get boring.

Naughty Boys always ends SO SOON.

There's a much improved translation of Lotus Love over at the blog:

https://grainsparrow.blogspot.com/2024/03/translation-lotus-love-yellow-magic.html

(In addition to stylistic fixes, I made a major error in the version originally in this thread -- misread one kanji, ruining a beautiful line...! Sorry Harry.)

Sports Men isn't the kind of song you'd think would move a man to tears, and yet, here we are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QusyWLaSQf4

2008, huh. Must be one of the all-time "damn shame"s of modern music that the HASYMO-incarnation YMO didn't record a new album.

Frogbs, you ever heard Hen Ogledd? Their album Free Humans is a huge favorite of mine. When I first heard HASYMO's Rescue, I thought, "Whoa! Sounds like the wellspring of Free Humans!" And then when I first heard Underworld's Space, I thought, "Clearly someone in Hen Ogledd loves Underworld." So it might do something for you.

I still feel happy that I caught that concert, I was a little perplexed at the setlist (and to some extent the inclusion of Christian Fennesz in the line up) at the time, but it makes perfect sense now.

haven't heard of them but I'm listening now and it's cute. kind of reminds me of the Ann Steel album actually. pretty long album but it's entertaining me so far :)

I've wondered for a while what a HASYMO album would sound like - the singles were okay but felt kind of stopgap. Tokyo Town Pages is nice but it doesn't hit me the way the stuff on Loophole does. idk, maybe their styles were too far off. Sakamoto in particular was so far away from any kind of pop music at that point. that London concert ruled though. amazing how for a YMO 'reunion' they only played like 3 YMO songs. probably the right decision though.

The first song on the Ann Steel album is killer!

I've got some exploring to do where YMO live is concerned. I feel like I know the studio catalogue inside and out at this point. But I went to look up the setlist of the London 2008 show and found out it has a DOUBLE ALBUM PROFESSIONAL RELEASE, what?! With Fennesz in the band indeed?! I did research into all the live releases back when I was getting started (with frogbs's help over on RYM) but the details didn't mean as much to me then as they of course do now... especially now that I've seen and cried through the back half of that Sports Men... and that was only song TWO of the night.

Also, Philharmony has rocketed up into my favorite albums of all time. It sounded a little thin and scattered for a while, like Hosono had let his usual "Master Overseer Producer" side slide so that he could indulge more freely in the sheer joy of tinkering around with a new synth/computer/toy. But listening to it obsessively this past week has revealed plenty of ingenuity, beauty, and emotion. Amazingly structured too, it turns out.

I love that I still have Technodon and the Sketch Show records waiting for me (and countless solo albums, productions, etc). I've been listening to almost nothing but Hosono/YMO since September 2023 and there's still so much just to hear for the first time, let alone reconsider/re-evaluate.

There's another DVD/CD release from Lyon that I'm guessing came out around the same time as the London Meltdown gig, not sure if the set lists differ much, or the lineup even.

Three years later they were doing a more straight ahead (for them) YMO set some of which is on YT and you can probably still buy somewhere - https://www.discogs.com/release/8467134-Yellow-Magic-Orchestra-Live-In-San-Francisco-2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp2P_zNG1A

Yet another for the "great live versions of Gradated Gray" folder. Hosono/Takahashi harmonies are the best. Incredible YT drumming.

I'm sure you'll like the Sketch Show stuff, they play a lot of it in those live shows so you probably know some of the tracks. I was surprised how well those albums held up actually, I kinda thought that glitchtronica pop sound was something that you could always tie back to the early 00s but it still sounds amazing

Technodon is an album I really didn't care for when I first heard it, it makes way more sense in context of their 90s solo albums though. like don't compare it to the other YMO albums, compare it to say Medicine Compilation. you could tell their styles weren't really jiving at this time but it actually sounds pretty great, I mean for me the big revelation was simply hearing it on a nice system where the bass really came through

also I kid you not the reason why I listen to Technodon so often is because the place I work loves to give out these mint chocolates called "Frango" which always makes me think "Pocketful of Frangos"

actually there are a few good advertising jingles in there. Be a Subaru Man

y'all are making me feel like I should give HASYMO another go. I don't mind that sound and I always found the recordings to be fine but... I can't imagine ever wanting to listen to HASYMO instead of regs YMO versions of any of those songs either. maybe this is the year it clicks tho!