And glimpses of reggae, jazz, funk, and krautrock all show up at unexpected moments, as if the listener is on some kind of weird, electronic musical safari. There are barely any vocals instead, vibrant melodies ping and bounce around like a room full of malfunctioning computers. It’s a hugely experimental, genre-colliding work that teeters on the brink between mastery and madness. It’s also full of wild, Prince - style guitar solos, and a panoply of synthesisers, drum machines and sequencers – the latter of which were brand-new technologies at the time.
Opening with a vocoder recital of a poem written by Chairman Mao, and closing with a melody taken from a famous Chinese revolutionary song, this debut solo album further highlights 26-year-old Sakamoto’s fascination with eastern history. But the best track is perennial Sakamoto highlight “Tong Poo” – a China-inspired composition built around exotic Eastern melodies and bleeping computer sounds.
That idiosyncratic debut, full of computerised melodies, funk-bass and glitchy synthesisers, yielded unlikely hits in the UK and America via the singles “Computer Game” and “Firecracker”. Easily one of the greatest Sakamoto projects was Yellow Magic Orchestra, an experimental pop group sometimes described as Japan’s answer to Kraftwerk or Giorgio Moroder, whose pioneering electronic music served as a formative influence on all kinds of emerging genres including techno, hip hop, synth-pop and video game music.Įffectively a supergroup comprising of three extraordinary veterans – rock musician and nascent super-producer Haruomi Hosono, drummer-vocalist Yukihiro Takahashi (who sadly passed away just a few days ago, in January 2023), and arranger-composer Sakamoto, who played keyboards – Yellow Magic Orchestra burst onto the music scene with their eponymous album in 1978.