Japan

The band Japan engineered one of the most remarkable transformations imaginable. When they first crept onto the scene, they were a highly derivative new wave glam band seemingly more concerned about their hair and wardrobe than in creating good music. The lead singer, David Sylvian, had a good solid baritone, but tried too hard to sound like Bryan Ferry. Their music was paper thin and instantly forgettable. They were just the kind of band that people look back to now with embarrassment, were the '80s really that cheesy? Did we really wear those clothes? What were we thinking?

Then, towards the end of their career, Japan entirely reinvented itself. Mick Karn, the bassist, got a fretless instrument and his style suddenly changed from uninspired but serviceable anchor to wholly original, fluid lead playing. David Sylvian, still echoing Bryan Ferry, took his voice and his lyrics more seriously and started writing more exotic, enigmatic material. And the other two members of the band, Steve Jansen (Sylvian’s brother) and Richard Barbieri, started exploring the world of delicately layered, finely wrought textures. The band suddenly became mysterious and exotic, very much like their name, an English take on the inscrutable East – neither here nor there, but inhabiting some exhilaratingly foreign yet strangely familiar landscape in between.

Their breakthrough album was 1980’s Gentlemen Take Polaroids. Taken as a whole, the album is, admittedly, a bit weak, but it does close with Taking Islands in Africa (cowritten by Yellow Magic Orchestra's Ryuichi Sakamoto), the best song they ever recorded and one that would certainly be in serious contention for my Top Ten Songs of All Time list (don’t hold your breath – it’s a list that will never be compiled). At an exhilarating moment in popular music, when all the boundaries seemed to be stretching at once, this song went so far out as to be completely off the map. I had never heard anything even remotely like it. It had more to do with the orchestral electronic music I was listening to – Synergy and Vangelis and Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre and the like – than anything that other bands were producing. It was hard to even hear it as a band, so novel were the sounds that made up the track. Other bands were also starting to embrace pure electronics as a option, but no other band sounded quite so organic. I loved the stark electronic timbres of bands like Kraftwerk and Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, but this was something else entirely. It was all clearly electronic, but the sounds were so warm and sophisticated and so finely textured that it sounded like the band had invented whole new instruments to play, or like they had discovered a cache of instruments from another planet. The layered keyboards and swirling effects were mesmerizing, and I literally could not get enough of this song, playing it over and over again until the record became more noise than signal.

Curiously, it wasn’t Gentlemen Take Polaroids that I wore out playing this track. At that time, a lot of adventurous music was just starting to drift across the Atlantic and stateside record companies weren’t sure what the traditionally slower and more conservative American public would respond to, so they waded into the river of new wave slowly and cautiously. Once a band had proven itself with a couple of well received records in England, an American label would collect a tentative “best of” from those couple of albums and release them over here, to see how they’d do. It was that way with Orchestral Manouevers in the Dark, who had a special American compilation made up from their first two albums, and so it was with Japan, who had their last two albums, Gentlemen Take Polaroids and their ultimate album (both literally and figuratively), Tin Drum plundered for a stateside release. Once those compilations proved to be successful, they were deleted and the original full albums were released. So the album I wore through was the now rare American compilation, simply called Japan.

While Gentlemen Take Polaroids marked their departure, Tin Drum heralded their arrival. Tin Drum is like nothing released before or since, a highly original collection of idiosyncratic songs, played with comfortable confidence and by a group of supremely skilled musicians carefully working a strange hybrid world of layered texture and fractured pop sensibilities. Almost no instruments are recognizable and the song structures are sophisticated and intriguingly exotic, yet still retain enough familiarity to pull you in. It’s dream music, future music, something you’d hear coming out of the radio in a through-the-looking-glass world like the dystopian fantasy portrayed in the visionary film Blade Runner or leaking out of the headphones of some shady character in a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. This magnificent achievement, certainly one of the best albums ever recorded, marked the absolute pinnacle of Japan’s career, and, after a remarkable live album (remarkable that they are even able to play this stuff live – and play it well), Japan disbanded.

Since then, all four members have gone on pursuing their passion for exotic layered sonic experimentation, with varying degrees of popular success and in various collaborative combinations. Of those post Japan careers, the one which most consistently interests me is that of Steve Jansen and Richard Barbieri, who almost always work together. David Sylvian runs a close second, and he has produced some exquisite works, including wonderfully varied collaborations with Can’s Holgar Czukay and King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, but some of his solo work is a little too precious for me. Mick Karn’s music is the least interesting to me, but that’s like saying Belgian chocolate isn’t quite as good as French or Swiss chocolate – it’s still leagues better than anything produced domestically. The four did reunite for a single (wonderful) album as Rain Tree Crow, and they do tend to show up on each other’s album’s a lot, so even though Japan has ceased to be a viable concern for twenty years, the rich and fertile ground they uncovered is still being fruitfully seeded and harvested, and I hope it stays that way for a long, long time.