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Japan had some terrific avant garde at the time, many of its bands had humoristic sensibilities, but were serious in being innovative in music. This song to me is a great example, it shouldn’t sound good as most instruments are highly compressed and saturated, but it does. It has long passages of harmonic dissonance but still resolve in the tonic. Love it.
Killer song. Fun, thoughtful, ahead of its time.
While their contemporaries in Düsseldorf, and later Detroit, were using synthesizer technology to create bleak dystopian music, YMO introduced a more “joyous and liberating” approach to electronic music. According to Sakamoto, they were “tired” of Japanese musicians imitating Western and American music at the time and so they wanted to “make something very original from Japan.”[49] Kraftwerk was particularly an influence on Sakamoto, who heard the band in the mid-1970s and later introduced them to his fellow band members.[49] They were impressed with Kraftwerk’s “very formalized” style but wanted to avoid imitating their “very German” approach. He described Kraftwerk’s music as “theoretical, very focused, simple and minimal and strong”.[50] Their alternative template for electronic pop was less minimalistic, made more varying use of synthesizer lines, introduced “fun-loving and breezy” sounds,[51] and placed a strong emphasis on melody[49] in contrast to Kraftwerk’s statuesque “robot pop”.[52]
The band also drew from a wider range of influences than had been employed by Kraftwerk.[31] These influences on YMO included Japanese electronic music (such as Isao Tomita),[53] traditional Japanese music, experimental Chinese music (of the Cultural Revolution era),[49] Indian music (such as Ravi Shankar and Bollywood music),[19] arcade game samples,[16][54] American rap,[32] exotica,[31] Caribbean ska,[31] Giorgio Moroder’s disco work,[4] the Beatles, the Beach Boys and their leader Brian Wilson,[55] Van Dyke Parks,[citation needed] classical music,[11] animal sounds,[56] and noise.[57] Sakamoto has expressed that his “concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise.”[57]
