Yellow Magic Orchestra

One of the most frustrating things for me is to find an exceptional album and then slowly, painfully, expensively, discover that it’s the only good one in their catalogue. So it is with Yellow Magic Orchestra.

I really tried to like them. To electronic music enthusiasts, YMO is legendary, and the influence on synthetic pop they supposedly wield is second only to Kraftwerk. So, I had to try them. Formed in Tokyo in the late ‘70s by Ryuichi Sakamoto, YMO also includes established solo artists Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi. Taking the clinical robotic pop of Kraftwerk as their model, YMO infused their electronic explorations with a distinctly Japanese twist. Early on, I bought their X00 Multiples album and was sorely disappointed. There is a truly surreal version of the Beatles’ Day Tripper played at a frantic pace, sounding exactly like a video game (Hosono would go on to write music for some classic videogames, including Galaga and Pac-man). And there is the instrumental Rydeen which is so relentlessly, artificially peppy that it’s frightening, like somebody smiling so hard that their face starts to rip, revealing the cyborg beneath. Beyond that, worthless. I promptly forgot about them.

In the early 90s, some of the seminal electronica groups got the remix treatment, turning over their tracks to modern house and techno producers that they inspired to be reconfigured. Yello got one. Art of Noise got three (!). And YMO got one. Although all the remix projects are painfully bad (only the Art of Noise’s ambient treatment can be listened to), they did inspire me to try YMO again, figuring I must’ve missed something.

Rifling through the used racks at my favorite haunt, Aron’s Records, I stumbled across Technodon, on which this song resides, and snapped it up. Technodon is a wonderful album, going, as it does, from the relentlessly cheery Superman to the haunting frozen icescape of Nostalgia, hitting lots of different moods in between. It is also an unusually literate release, especially considering the three members of YMO are Japanese. They tap notorious ex-junkie William S. Burroughs to lend his distinctive sandpaper voice to two pieces and another track runs a suitably moody sci-fi backing under excerpts from a novel by William Gibson, who is credited with creating the “cyberpunk” genre with his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Technodon is by far YMO’s most polished and interesting work, but, as I learned the hard way, it’s not YMO. In fact, even though it was produced by the three principles, it turns out that this was a reunion album of sorts, recorded several years after they broke the band up to focus on their solo careers. The cover even features the letters YMO with a red slash through them, to distinguish it from their earlier incarnation, although it’s too subtle to be taken seriously. It’s clearly meant to be a YMO album, slash notwithstanding, but it rises far above their other, earlier, irritatingly expensive works. As I was to discover over the next few months.

This moody, narrative piece is one of the tracks that features the unmistakably jaded voice of William S. Burroughs. Burroughs’ world-weary voice makes a perfect complement to the grand, dark cinematic scope of the music. The plodding beat and slowly swelling music sounds creepy and forlorn. There’s an awful inevitability to this track – it sounds like plastic stormtroopers marching or the final assault of the machines, winning the war against humanity and creating the Matrix or the Terminator or Soylent Green or whatever paranoid vision of the future you subscribe to. I especially like the way this track ends, with Burroughs wearily repeating “speed up, slow down, this way, that way, right, left, stop, stay here, go, over there”, a litany of uselessness, a fragment of hopeless humanity caught in the machine, the musical equivalent of that awful scene in Fritz Lang’s astonishingly prescient Metropolis, where a man desperately tries to move a machine’s arms to the indicated positions over and over and over again until he collapses from exhaustion.

After Yellow Magic Orchestra really broke up, the three principles continued developing their solo careers. Of the three, Ryuichi Sakamoto has had the highest profile career, producing several influential and highly regarded albums and working with everybody from David Sylvian to David Bowie to David Byrne (with whom he shares an Academy Award for the soundtrack to The Last Emperor). Haruomi Hosono has actually produced the most work of the three – partly because he had a well-established career before YMO even formed. His music is all over the map, some of it fantastic, and some of it awful. He’s done some great ambient work and some very interesting electronic experiments, but his albums are virtually impossible to find outside of Japan. He’s also done some execrable work in the enka genre, a rough Japanese equivalent of easy listening mixed with urban contemporary. It’s not as though his ballady stuff is so much more awful then other enka I’ve heard, but enka is so painfully awful for me to listen to as a whole that it’s difficult for me to sit still long enough to appreciate his contributions. And Yukihiro Takahashi? No idea. He’s supposed to have gone back to his interest in Japanese rock music (to be played in Japanese rock gardens?), and I figure that, since most of YMO is awful and since both Sakamoto and Hosono have interesting, engaging solo releases, then Takahashi must be the bad egg of the bunch.