A techno kayô unsung hero called Kanji Honma

I recently acknowledged Kanji Honma’s existence by randomly browsing Sony’s Techno Magic Kayôkyoku anthology and crisscrossing data about the unsung producers of the Techno Kayô electro pop tidal wave at the beginning of the 80s. Of course YMO’s Hosono, Sakamoto and Takahashi were the movers and thinkers of the movement, but some drudges and innovators had to make up for the huge demand of both label A&Rs and sci-fi crazed teens in the audience (and the Techno Magic Kayoukyoku focuses exactly on them)... In spite of surnames written in kanji only and out-of-print releases and reissues, I managed to redeem a few mavericks like the short-lived Targets (who only released two albums in 1982 and 1983 but still managed to have a best-of album released on P-Vine in 2000), the beautiful Shi-Shonen or ex Yonin Bayashi Daiji Okai’s Pegmo, whose first eponymous album sounds like a psyched-out and even more hectic version of P-Model. Supposedly the first Japanese musician to own a CMI Fairlight’s working station, Honma (real name Jôyô Katayanagi) weirdly enough seems more famous among vintage manga aficionados for the use of several tracks from his own Honma Express solo project’s You See I in anime opening credits :

More importantly, Honma joined forces with Takumi Iwasaki (also known as plain Takumi) in pure electronic duet TPO, who recently had the honour of a full-fledged CD anthology and had a minor hit with the marvelously silly “Hoshimaru Ondo”, composed as the official song of the international Expo'85's weird mascot Cosmo Hoshimaru (interested nerds can go to this youtube channel for details):

TPO - Hoshimaru Ondo

Both were also part of Films, a supergroup of some sort inspired by the Buggles which also included future members of Jun Togawa’s Yapoos and Portable Rock (in case you don't know, the great electropop unit which introduced Maki Nomiya to the world before a decade or so before Pizzicato 5). Obviously, the songwriting efforts in both TPO and Films are never half as good as in YMO’s members’ related projects, but Films’ first album entitled Misprints, which was reissued by P-Vine a few years back as part of the Techno Ca-Yo Collection, is pretty great on numerous levels. First of all, it‘s a thematic album about the future (I’m not sure how) with an instrumental opener, skits and all; second, it’s gorged with synthetic burbles and lush polyphonic pads; eventually, there’s an uncanny sensible indie pop feel buried deep inside both its pristine melodies and the hesitant vocal performances courtesy of Chuji Akagi (also a virtuoso of the Theremin, if you need to know) and Yoko Kojima. All in all, it’s a winner. Consider the long-ish, multipartite track called “30^th Century Boy”: of course it begins with Sakamoto tinged notes and a lead synth part that wouldn’t sound misplaced on a Logic System track; but once Akagi’s fragile voice and the guitars show up, it just doesn’t sound like anything else.

Films - 30th Century Box

“Take Me On The Liner Jet” sounds even more ominously naïve: the bassline is a regular upbeat Moroder stomp, Kojima’s voice is even cruder than Narumi Yasuda’s and both the vocoder-ed hook and the staccato arpeggios stand on the verge between awful and sublime. A true high-end second division techno kayô oddity!

Films - Take Me On The Liner Jet

Always the technology lover, Honma recently achieved a whole album only using a Nintendo DS called “DS I Love You” and Sakamoto is a fan (well, he tweeted about it). We wish him the best.

Modern shima-uta, ups & downs

Most people have heard more Okinawan folk music (and drunk more Okinawa awamori) than they know: the peculiar sound of the three-stringed sanshin is almost as ominous to Western ears than that of its descendant the shamisen, and the tradition of Okinawan shima-uta (島唄, "songs of the island") has been kept alive and kicking through the very popular crossover efforts of Takashi Hirayasu and (before him) Champloose leader Shoukichi Kina, who composed the very first greatest hit song to come out of Okinawa, "Haisai Ojisan".



A frequent collaborator of Ry Cooder, Kina even had the honors of a David Byrne curated compilation as volume 2 of his Asia Classics collection on Luaka Bop (the very same series that saw the release of Vikaya Anand's anthology Listen Now! Dance Raja Dance, a very special Cartilage favorite indeed) and it's easy to understand why: mixing enka styled country music, 70s rock, punk rock energy and burbly synthesizers courtesy of Sandii & the Sunsetz co-leader and Haruomi Hosono collaborator Makoto Kubota, Kina's fusion efforts are magnetic and nothing short of irresistible - at least up to the mid 80s (things inescapably turned ugly with the advent of DX7 driven salon world music). Recorded in 1977 at the peak of his creative moment, "Tokyo Sanboka" is super energetic bliss:



Shoukichi Kina & Champloose "Tokyo Sanboka"

Not an Okinawa native himself (he was born in the district of Minato, in Tôkyo), Hosono has incidentally entertained a long-lived fascination for Okinawan music, which is at least as prominent as that of his passion for Hoagy Carmichael’s “Hong Kong Blues” and Martin Denny’s imaginary Hawaii. From his exotica-driven pop trilogy of the 70s to his great ambient masterpieces of the 90s, his extensive recreation of shima-uta is pretty much a constant feature of his music, and an influential one for that matter: hokoten superstars The Boom had an amazing hit single with an allegedly Hosono (ugly) pakuri called “Shimauta” which sold more than 1.5 million units.



More surprisingly, his super long-time YMO sidekick Sakamoto Ryûichi himself also revived the idea of a pop version of Taketomi Island’s hymn “Asadoya Yunta" (which he had helped Hosono cover on his own Paraiso 1978 masterpiece) at the time of his great “world music Quincy Jones” years. Apart from the Youssou N’Dour annoying singing exercises, one can only relish at the tenderness of his own version, magnified by the presence of Nenes leader and great sanshin player Misako Koja:



Even sweeter is his version of traditional song “Chinsagu no Hana”, which adds burkinabé percussions and typical emotional strings to the ethereal mixture, to heart-rending effects (I kind of take it for granted you're not of the cold-blooded type of reader):


Ryûichi Sakamoto "Chinsagu no Hana"

Obviously, Hosono’s nods to Okinawan music remain the more relevant and less predictable ones, especially when they power up his ventures into electronic music. Apart from the 100% Okinawa culture driven ethno-ambient soundtrack “Paradise View” (released in 1985 and annoyingly hard to find, you tell me if you find a copy), fragments of shima-uta can be heard in the least expected surroundings. They are for instance all over YMO’s “Absolute Ego Dance” (with a typical vocal performance by Hawaiian born Sandii), released on their hits collection Solid State Survivor:
















Yellow Magic Orchestra "Absolut Ego Dance"

Similarly, the hectic gem he composed and produced for the short-lived techno-kayôkyoku unit E.S. Island, lead by 70s idol Sanae Takahashi, screams Okinawa all over, in the weirdest, most convulsive manner:



E.S. Island "Tech Tech Mummy"

Closer in style to his hippie-ish pop ambient project Love, Peace & Trance (formed with Wha-ha-ha singer Mishio Ogawa), Hosono recently came back to shima-uta with the heavenly nostalgic and delicate “Roochoo Divine”, which intensely echoes his own 1974 song “Roochoo Gumbo” and was released as opener of his rarities collection Archives vol. 1. Accordingly, it is the single most beautiful piece of music he recorded in recent years, which says a lot about how great a song it actually is.

















Haruomi Hosono "Roochoo Divine"

Following Kina's and Hosono’s pioneering gestures, a great number of current Okinawan indie pop bands still display the obligatory nods to shima-uta, even if not in the most creative manners. I’m not sure it means the folklore is actually in full bloom or artificially kept alive, but I can’t think of any other example of folk music in Japan which have entertained such a constant dynamic of reinvention. Next time, let’s go back in time and see what Okinawan musicians of the 60s had to say about the matter, with a survey of the wonderful Ryukyu Rare Groove - Shimauta Pops in 60's-70's compilation (Yara Family, anyone?).

Jaime e Nair, an A & an I

The duet of proggy-folk heads Jaime Alem and Nair Cândia was the rarest of things: a unit that managed to be both sweet and challenging. Akin to the hazy, vaporous, candid and complex masterpieces of a few Brazilian acts of the 70s (everything Joyce recorded between 1971 and 1980, and most of the Clube da Esquina related acts after the Nascimento and Lô Borges eponymous 1972 album), their breezy yet slick pop music was a dreamy super mixed bag of tradition and forecasting, latin and Western, earth and air. In terms of etiquettes and in spite of its superficial slickness, it contained even more multitudes than the most excessive and cannibalizing melanges of Tropicália - western folk music, country music, psychedelia, post Beach Boys polyphonies, modernist samba, Nordeste forró and Rio de Janeiro choro - but in a much more cohesive, solid way than most crossover contemporaries (I'm thinking of futbol fans Novos Baianos, for instance, who quite simply, even if effectively, played bossa nova licks and hyperactive samba to typical 70s electric guitar pyrotechnics). A solid composer, São Paulo born Jaime Alem mostly composed soundtracks for theater plays (and Maria Bethania) before lauching the duet - with his wife Nair - that would make him famous. Most of the LPs they recorded together are low-key gems in their own rights - predictably enough, they recorded the obligatory cover albums of Jobim and Nascimento - but nothing touches their first eponymous album of 1974.

"Sob O Mar" ("under the sea"), the opening song, is classic 70s stuff (those strings, those strings!) and seems like it was plucked from the masterpiece Nelson Angelo e Joyce, but it's brilliant and cosmic (allright, seaborne) in its very own manner.


Jaime e Nair "Sob O Mar"

Starting ominously in beatlesian manner, "Nevoa Seca" ("dry haze") goes further in the crossover direction: it's got slide guitar à la George Harrison, europop strings (panned on the left) and doesn't sound Brazilian at all - except for Jaime's voice and words, which seem oddly inappropriate in such a lushly European context. Of course, it's beautiful, too.


Jaime e Nair "Nevoa Seca"

Slightly more predictably, "Nigua-Ninhas E Coco Do Norte" verges on Gilberto Gil territory: a Nordeste dance tune played on an electric piano, with sweet, heart-wrenching verses to cool things down a little.


Jaime e Nair "Nigua-Ninhas E Coco Do Norte"

Playing the crossover game in modest and inconspicuous manner, "Sabia, Diga La" is probably the most adventurous of the bunch; it's wearing all the characteristics of a 70s country rock song on its sleeve, but it's driven by a typical Brazilian beat. And need I mention the grandness of its chorus?


Jaime e Nair "Sabia, Diga La"

Talk soon.

Samba doido & shit

Believe me when I'm telling you that joining up the Consortium team is not an easy task - I've battled up for three weeks to come out with something that could fit in the "oddball" policy of the house (the fear over at the Bureau was that I would try and subvert their exacting, psyched-out editorial policy with deep house tracks or early IDM nuggets - something which I must confess I otherwise crave for) But I'm not of the terrorist type, rather of the compliant one, and I do want to fit in (I'm a social creature). And when the people at the Bureau asked me to focus on all things Brazilian as a way to start up our cooperation, I'm telling you, nothing could make me happier.

Now, one obvious understatement in their demand was that I couldn't bore you all with super classic misknown Bossa Nova or 1930s Nordeste Frevo shit (but trust me, I will when I'm more integrated). In the meantime, I've sifted through the swampiest territories of the Brazilian music part of my discotheque in search for something valid enough that wouldn't play the "you're not expecting this from Brazil" game in a too much obvious way (but super weird gems by industrial pop unit Harry and electroacoustic composer Jorge Antunes are piling up). So here are a few exploitation tinted tracks that could make Quincy go nuts like he's just had too many shots of cachaça (and I promise I'll keep the shut up next time).

First and foremost, Iet's take a fusion ride. I'm pretty sure all you prog-rock, electric jazz heads already know the super famous band Azymüth. Even their name was (still is, actually) terrible and a lot of their tracks could end up on a very ugly German lounge hip-hop compilations (for that matter, I just found out the international version of their first album was reissued by Far Out in 2007 with the unavoidable remix bonus cd). But they had grandiose moments, on their own or collaborating with Ana Mazzotti or ex-Bossa nova sweet-heart, later reborn as a bearded purveyor of funky, moog-y pop tunes Marcos Valle; and honestly, who cares about good taste when you can hear cuica playing the ominous part over trippy Moog escalations and Arp Solina pads in a gritty electric jazz tune?


Azymüth: Melô Dos Dois Bicudos

Hidden deep down inside the fabric of their all-too-listenable first eponymous album, you can also find a funky, poppy tune sung in Marcos Valle style by a guy called Marcio Lott (a regular presence in the legendary Radio MEC studios in Rio, where the supergenius Edu Lobo - scroll further down for details - crafted some of his craziest pieces). It's called "Esperando Minha Vez" and don't tell me you wouldn't go crazy for it if it came from a super obscure library music LP.


Azymüth: Esperando Minha Vez


Then, a true curiosity by a true pop genius, the super famous but largely misunderstood Chico Buarque (we Frenchies have to blame a soda commercial with sepia images of mulatto kids playing football on a beach for the confusion), from his "I'm a serious composer with a big moustache and I'm more politically involved than you are" period. I could have chosen any song from his amazing, amazingly challenging Construção of 1971 but they're probably too serious for the purpose of this post (you should just go and buy the whole LP asap anyway). Apart from the sublime nocturne ballad "Barbara", few people know his Chico Canta album, or rather most people stay away from it, because of its typical 70s fusion arrangements. It's a shame. Despite the fact that most songs were co-written with Brazilian Nouvelle Vague enfant terrible Ruy Barra, it's really the arrangements by Edu Lobo which make it unmissable. The instrumental tracks are cinematique, pure blackspoitation dope:


Chico Buarque "Ana de Amsterdam"

And to end on an ominous, grandiose note, I give you the opening track of Edu Lobo's most ambitious work, the christic Missa Breve. Born in 1943, Lobo had the most interesting of careers: a sophisticatingly smudgy singer, a revered composer of the second wave of Bossa-Nova (he composed classic tunes like "Candeias" or "Corrida De Jangada", famously sung by Nara Leão - we'll come back to her - and MPB postergirl Elis Regina) and author of some of the most gorgeous MPB albums of the end of the 60s, he took things to another level after studying orchestral arrangements in Los Angeles (while sleeping on a mattress at the house of his friend Sergio Mendes). Many parts of Missa Breve are instrumental, some of them verging on modern classical, Xenakis-sian moments, but I really needed to stick to the crossover, exploitation thematic of this post and have you hear his voice, too.


Edu Lobo "Vento Bravo"

Talk soon for related sh*t.