Help Yourself Longsleeve
Help Yourself Longsleeve
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Yellow Magic Orchestra formed in 1978 and were influential for many electronic artists and preceding musical genres - from the New Romantic movement to Hip Hop and soundtracks to the biggest video games. The band was made up principally of Haruomi Hosono (bass), Yukihiro Takahashi (drums) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (keyboards); now considered to be pioneers of the electronic sound and live performance of it. While the band lasted less than a decade, all members went on to have prolific solo careers, and their lasting impact survives through modern movies, video games and numerous musicians.
The first official release of the newly formed Yellow Magic Orchestra was the 10-track studio album Yellow Magic Orchestra, which was released in 1978 in Japan. This album was groundbreaking in a way, as it took full advantage of the limited technology available at the time to create a joyful electronic soundscape that ran in stark contrast to the work of other bands experimenting in the field at the time, such as the German band Kraftwerk. While Kraftwerk developed soundscapes that evoked dystopian, robot realities, Yellow Magic Orchestra took a more happy-go-lucky approach to their electronic creations. The album paved the way for the likes of electro, hip hop and techno.
The concept involved a bit of a tongue-in-cheek parodying of exoticization and Orientalism in the West. The group wanted to take that image of the East that Western artists were portraying of their homeland and remake it from a Japanese perspective. That’s how it came to be that one of the singles on the album is a cover of 'Firecracker' by Martin Denny. The warped reimagining of Denny’s (warped in of itself) vision of the East was a huge success within Japan, and played a part in the band’s international exposure.
Tokyo’s Pit Inn in the Shinjuku district is considered by many to be Japan’s “most important jazz club.” An institution established in 1966, the Pit Inn had seen many of Japan’s finest musicians play its stage. As with many places of repute, a few other establishments tried to copy the style of the late-night entertainment venue. One even copied the name, a bar in Roppongi called the Roppongi Pit Inn, which opened in 1978 and closed in 2002. It was there, after the release of their debut album, that Yellow Magic Orchestra were “discovered” by some American executives for A&M Records on other business in Japan. An international deal with A&M gave the group what was long-sought: foreign audiences. They could finally bring their own version of technopop to the world and set right the way the East could be represented musically. 'Firecracker' would go on to become a huge hit in the US, and the bandmates realised that what they had was something special. They decided it might be worth focusing on the group for a time.
During the four consecutive day performance at the Nippon Budokan in December 1980, YMO piloted an innovative electronic instrument. It was Roland’s unreleased Drum Machine TR-808. The TR-808 stimulated the reform of the world’s dance music in the coming years and YMO fully used it in their new album “BGM” in the spring of 1981. Also, in their following album “Technodelic” which was released in November 1981, the hand-made sampler LMD-649 was used. Hideki Matsutake joined in on the development of this machine. The “Technodelic” became an album remembered for its world’s first extensive usage of the sampler.
YMO left a big mark on the history of Japanese culture but at the same time, they largely affected countries outside of Japan. Simply looking at their music, they won the respect of synthesizer pop artists of their generation. One of their goals was Kraftwerk and due to the influence of YMO, they later adopted the Japanese coined word “techno pop” for their album name. After ending their activity in 1983, the three members of YMO each became active solo artists. Haruomi Hosono set his directions from electro music to ambient music. Ryuichi Sakamoto became a composer of film music in parallel with pop music and won the Academy Award for Original Music Score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Emperor.” Yukihiro Takahashi pursued the Japanese style pops J-POP.
