It seems that everyone is loving Yellow Magic Orchestra at the moment. I’ve been trying to figure out why there’s such an explosion of YMO related tunes floating around recently, but all I can settle on is that Japanese tunes are in vogue as the next, relatively untapped source of rare grooves and beats due to language differences. Italo and Euro beats are naturally more comfortable to mine through, but Japanese music history has been seemingly left untouched.
Regardless, here’s some tunes from solo ventures from Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto (both of YMO) if you haven’t stumbled across them before. Anything Sakamoto lends himself to is gold, and that Iggy Pop collab is especially, and surprisingly, addictive.
Ryuichi Sakamoto & Iggy Pop – Risky
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Neo Geo
Haruomi Hosono – S.F.X
Haruomi Hosono – Body Snatchers
Ryuichi Sakamoto & Koharu Kisaragi – Neo Plant
YMO – Seoul Music