<
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/02/ryuichi-sakamoto-the-avant-gardist-who-became-a-groundbreaking-pop-star>
"Ryuichi Sakamoto was not a man cut out to be a pop star. As a teenager, he
liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but his abiding passion was New
York’s underground avant garde art scene – Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, Andy Warhol –
and its accompanying experimental music: he was fond of pointing out to
interviewers that he was born the year that John Cage composed 4’33. At
university, he studied the work of modern composers Boulez, Stockhausen and
Ligeti; he had a particular interest in the challenging electronic compositions
of Iannis Xenakis. The first album to bear Sakamoto’s name, 1975’s
Disappointment/Hateruma, was a collaboration with percussionist Toshiyuki
Tsuchitori that consisted entirely of free improv. If he was going to have a
role in the Japanese pop world at all, it was in the background, using his
keyboard skills and interest in the fast-developing world of synthesisers to
find employment as a session musician.
But a pop star was exactly what Sakamoto became, at least for a time. A 1978
session for singer Haruomi Hosono led to the suggestion that they should form a
band with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi. Yellow Magic Orchestra went on to become
both the biggest band in Japan – inspiring a degree of paparazzi attention and
screaming fervour among fans that Sakamoto seems to have loathed every minute
of – and the first Japanese artists to find more than novelty or cult status in
the west.
Yellow Magic Orchestra were successful, but they were groundbreaking too. The
convenient shorthand was that they were the Japanese Kraftwerk, although in
truth, YMO didn’t really sound like Kraftwerk at all. Alongside the
synthesizers, they used guitars, bass and acoustic drums. They were more
straightforwardly aligned to disco: their debut album even featured an
electronic version of the deathless “ooah ooah” whoop from the Michael Zager
Band’s
Let’s All Chant. You could detect the influence of jazz fusion and,
later, the UK’s ongoing ska revival. Like Throbbing Gristle, they appeared
fascinated by the kitschy 1950s exotica of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, which
had featured traditional Japanese instruments and quasi-“oriental” melodies;
Yellow Magic Orchestra’s biggest international hit was a version of Denny’s
1959 track
Firecracker."
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
