Interior with ST, 1982 and Design, 1987

I don't normally like anything electronic and it's quite absent from this blog as you might have noted, but this band, discography and info here, seems just a little bit more inventive than the average from this bin selection, though this is definitely the genre we are dealing with here.

First album was disappointing to me, being the typical 'minimal synth' style of minimal effort at composition.  A typical song, this one called Luft:






So despite the previous reductio ad absurdum one-note simplicity, it turns out the band was capable of much more creative composition, as seen from the track called NY 1908 with its etude-like character roving over various chords, descending into the Terry Riley-like minimalist ethos at the end:





On the other hand the album closes with synthesizer chords that just absolutely take me on an iditarod sleigh ride to heaven on the track that is Out of Tokyo:

Sophia (Japan, 1984)

You'll get a distinct Rush feeling on the first track, called Celebration (compare, YYZ):

And throughout this great little 12-inch proggy hard rock 'mini-album'.  Information here.  Vocals appear on the second track.  The whole has a very DIY feel.  Unfortunately, their follow-up CD called Defiance from 1986 became more straightforward, with conventional chord changes, and is therefore of a lot less interest.

Tatsuro Yamashita in 7 albums (Add Some Music, Circus Town, Spacey, Pacific etc.)

These are some of the worst covers (apart from the first and Spacy) we've seen lately on this blog. (Not at all aided by the inclusion of the artist's image.)  Musically we have here a case where a very inauspicious beginning in the first album of cover versions of Beach Boys songs led to some very nice funky but simple fusion pop in Circus and his masterpiece Spacy, then a total sell-out into commercial funky Japa-pop that deteriorated so quickly that by the not so late year of 1979 and the ridiculous Poppin' album there is already not one single interesting track or song, in fact, I couldn't even listen through completely to one song without fast forwarding, or worse in fact, I couldn't even listen to more than 10 seconds of each song without jumping to the next.  So it's similar to Paul Dirac's famous delta function that starts at zero, is able to jump to infinity at the unity point and then drop to zero again in all subsequent numerical inputs.  (This mathematical function found its place to everyone's surprise in quantum physics.)  To be honest we've seen this kind of thing before, one masterpiece standing shoulders-high in a large field of garbage or perhaps more appropriately a swirling oceanic pacific patch of plastic refuse.  But I'm being a bit too unkind to this artist.

I think the album Circus (1976) has some really fun compositions reminiscent of the best of Godiego, albeit quite a bit simpler, and worse, and Spacy (1977) of course in addition to the magnificent and masterful art, is good from beginning to end.  A true delight.  His discography is here.  The bio states the following:

Singer-songwriter and producer, born 4 February 1953. Husband of Mariya Takeuchi. Heavily influenced by American jazz, soul & big band music, his first album, Add Some Music To Your Day, containing cover versions of songs by the Beach Boys and other golden age American songs, is now extremely rare & sought-after. His major debut came in 1976 with Circus Town, which was recorded in New York and Los Angeles, the former with the participation of famed conductor & arranger Charlie Calello.

His popular breakthrough came in 1980 with the release of Ride On Time, whose title track peaked at #3 on the Oricon singles chart and was used in a TV ad for Maxell audio cassettes featuring Yamashita. He is probably best-known for composing & performing his 1983 song "Christmas Eve", which appeared on his album Melodies that year and was notably covered by Pentatonix for the Japanese release of their That's Christmas To Me album.

He is also famous as record collector and the DJ of Japan's most famous oldies radio show called "Tatsuro Yamashita's Sunday Songbook" (TOKYO FM). This program started on October 3, 1992 as a Saturday Songbook, but changed to the Sunday Songbook on April 3, 1994. And it is a long run program that continues to date.

Clearly he is popular as witnessed by the fact wikipedia English lists him (not the wonderful Japanese version with its AI-artful poetic translations), and when I listen to a great song like Minnie, I can see why-- here on youtube, not sure why not removed due to copyright.  (In which case, you can try the general search function with links here.)

From the 'masterpiece' Spacy (check out again the boy with the X-ray jet-killing vision) the seventh track, viz. (言えなかった言葉を):

Masahiko Satoh, Part 4 (Belladonna 1975, Electro Keyboard Orchestra 1975, Multispheroid 1977, YaKsa 1985, Twilight Monologues 1984, Silky Adventure 1986)

I post all of these after Christmas and the three other M. Satoh packages, amassing together essentially some leftover albums which range from a bit more disappointing to a lot more disappointing-- kind of like the guilt of looking at your credit card statement after the binge buying of Christmas sales and Black Friday, or like looking at the expensive presents your extended family, hopefully not close family, wasted money on that you will hide away in a mothball-filled closet for the rest of eternity and never look at again. Gotta hate your mother in law, even if there weren't a million other reasons, just for that awful tendency of buying the worst Xmas presents.  (And for myself, for Xmas I'll once again pray my wife doesn't look at this blog.)

Going through it quickly, to minimize the discomfort brought on by this wide-bore needle injection unfortunately medically necessary for your survival, the soundtrack Belladonna from 1975 is totally and completely by the numbers OST/library stuff, I almost want to write him a letter to say, 'what were you thinking; why couldn't you come up with better music?  Why can't you be more like Morricone?? Or your compatriot Jun Fukamachi???'  Like we say to our kids.  The track called Mr. London gives you an idea, once again, bearing in mind this is the best composition:

On the 1975 keyboard album called Electro Keyboard Orchestra, wherein he is accompanied by 7 other pianists including our old fave Yuji Ohno (note there were several Ohno posts back then on this blog, what wonderful music that was), there is some delightful fusion here and there, witness Mother of the Future:





Note that this track surprisingly was written by Carlos Garnett.  His original rendition and album were garbage, if I recall correctly.

Moving right along to the next big bowtied box of nuthin', we have the piano improvisation called Multi-Spheroid etc., which on top of being purely solo grand piano, is completely extemporized in a non-key or atonal manner with nothing at all familiar to cling to (unless you're one of those third world children of the garbage dumps that lives on top of a pile of refuse).  As usual it amazes me that this kind of 'music' would be put out as a real LP back in the day, when better music is thrown out as 'tax scam releases' and never sees the light.  Absolutely deplorable.  And unlistenable.  The best thing is without a doubt the artwork that graces the album, which entranced me for quite some time, trying to understand what it was all about.  Have a look at it above.

Then Twilight Monologues features 4 pianists, again on solo acoustic, again uselessly boring.  Please, give me back the ten minutes I wasted on this, or I will break the record over your heads, you four.  Get back over here, you wimps.  The album from 1986 with bamboo flute player Yamamoto (we saw him too before here) is piano plus bamboo, and surely you are begging for a couple of giant pandas to eat all of his bamboo instruments to relieve you from this torture by the time you get to the end.  Although, instead of free atonal garbage, we are dealing here with simplistic folktune-like garbage.  A familiar thing to those children of the dumps.  The Iberian track at least is good:





And that leaves us with Yaksa, another OST, from 1985 this time.  Here it's Toots Thielemans (on harmonica of course and as usual) who is accompanying Satoh and the music is at least approachable and occasionally interesting, though once again he falls into the death-trap trash compactor of simplistic composition, so unlike the packages 1-3 in our pre-Christmas Satoh Special.  In fact, where the hell did all the good music go, oh-Satoh-San????

It's unfortunate in particular that the theme song sung by Nancy Wilson, which resembles the James Bond songs, is so disappointing.  For example the Prologue starts so promising, quite Dave Grusin-like in sound, and then when Toots tries to get in on the action, it becomes reduced to the worst sort of big band / library jazz track from the standard American jazz bin:





It's like you want to slap him on his back while he's playing his harmonica so he swallows it by accident, or it gets stuck in his mouth like the stick the road runner put in the coyote's mouth that keeps his jaw open so he can't play any chords anymore except G7 and C while breathing in and out.

So obviously I won't be pursuing any more Masahiko Satoh, and we will just try to remember those glorious albums that were so full of creative and wonderful ideas and so progressive in their melding of jazz and classical with electric instrumental energy: All in-All out, Chagall, Amorphism, and the two Medical Sugar Banks.

I'll continue in the next couple of weeks with some more fantastic Japanese progressive music that was totally new to me, maybe not to you.

Masahiko Satoh, Part Three, 2 more

Amazingly the album from 1986 called Amorphism doesn't disappoint in the least bit.  The track oddly called Utopala sounds like it's from the greatest European fusion albums of the seventies, with the brilliant cello melody conversing lovingly with the electric keys so gorgeously and emotionally:

Then I have the 2005 album Live at Moers which does, finally, disappoint me a little, but still has quite a lot of good music to enjoy, similar to the situation with Orchestre National.

And I know that he was so hugely productive that many out there more familiar with his oeuvre know of some albums from him well worth hearing, which I've never heard.