Christopher John Mosdell (born 9 November 1949)[1] is a British lyricist, poet, author, composer, vocalist and illustrator based in Tokyo, Japan, and New York City, United States.[2]
He has collaborated with an extensive array of musicians and artists, though he is especially known for his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra and the poet Shuntarō Tanikawa. His interactive audio-visual album Equasian, featuring an experimentation with "VISIC" (visual music), melded his scientific background into a musical framework, and his Oracles of Distraction, a set of poetic cards set to musical coordinates, further expanded his lyrical idiom.[3]
As "Mozz", Mosdell has also released a series of award-winning children's books, which he also illustrates.[8]
A film about his life entitled "Ink Music: In the Land of the Hundred-Tongued Lyricist", featuring interviews with many of his collaborators and shot in Japan and the United States, was released in 2009.[9] The documentary bills him as the "Lafcadio Hearn of Lyrics",[10] Long term collaborator Ryuichi Sakamoto describes his interpretation of how Mosdell creates his varied works; "When I read his lyrics, I see him in a high school chemistry laboratory, making Molotov cocktails – his eyes lucid, blue and very clear."[11]
In 2023 he was the recipient of Japan’s Classics Day Cultural Foundation Prize, an award “honouring individuals who have contributed to the dissemination and enlightenment of Japanese classical culture” ––an award presided over by Her Imperial Princess Akiko of Mikasa.[12]
Biography
Early lyrical life
Mosdell was born in Gainsborough, England and grew up in North Wales.[3] He moved to Tokyo in 1976 after completing a BSc (specialising in microbiology) from the University of Nottingham and withdrawing from a master's degree in pathology at the University of Exeter[3] after realising his scientific leanings were at odds with his poetic interests.[2] Arriving in Japan, he became a script-writer for NHK, numerous radio programs, a reporter for Radio Free Europe, and a reader of the BBC World Service radio news. His plays The Sound Seller (1977) and The Star Polisher (1978) were both produced for NHK and his collected television scripts, Laugh Out Loud (Asahi Publishing), were published in 1979—an edition that is still a popular text in Japanese universities today.
In 1977, a series of Mosdell's poems, published in the Japan Times, came to the attention of the drummer for the Sadistic Mika Band, Yukihiro Takahashi. Takahashi asked to use the poems as the lyrical base for pop singer Rajie, whose album he was producing.[3]
Shortly afterward, Sadistic Mika Band disbanded, and some of the remaining members, including Takahashi, formed Sadistics as a follow-up act. Mosdell wrote the lyrics to the "Crazy Kimono Kids" and "Tokyo Taste" for their Sadistics album (1977).
Mainstream success
Takahashi continued to be a prime collaborator for Mosdell, inviting him to participate as the lyricist in his next musical endeavour, Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), who would go on to major success not only in Japan, but be one of the few Japanese acts to become known overseas as influential innovators in the field of popular electronic music.[13][14] They helped pioneer synthpop[15] and ambient house,[13] helped usher in electronica,[16] anticipated the beats and sounds of electro music,[17] laid the foundations for contemporary J-pop,[18] and contributed to the development of house,[13][19]techno,[19][20] and hip hop.[16]
Mosdell's best-known YMO songs include "Behind the Mask", "Solid State Survivor", "Nice Age", "Insomnia", "La Femme Chinoise", and "Citizens of Science", from the albums Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978), Solid State Survivor (1979), and ×∞ Multiplies (1980)—lyrics envisaging a socially inert world, digitised and impersonal, and controlled by a forceful hidden authority within a landscape, essentially Japanese, but tinged with Chinese motifs.
The popularity and international influence of YMO made Mosdell a sought-after lyricist for other Japanese recording artists, as well as continuing as the central lyricist for the Yellow Magic Orchestra live album Public Pressure (1982). During this time Mosdell wrote chart-topping lyrics for other artists, including, among many others, Sandii and the Sunsetz, Sheena & The Rokkets, and Imitation.
Continuing his friendship and collaboration with the songwriters behind YMO, Mosdell also worked with these artists on their solo work, writing the bulk of the lyrics for Yukihiro Takahashi's Murdered by the Music solo LP, and the synthpop club single, "War Head" with Ryuichi Sakamoto. "War Head", originally titled "Night Boys Pick Up Some Heat", was written for the opening of the Roppongi nightclub Lexington Queen, but was so favoured by Sakamoto that he remixed it, with Mosdell performing vocals for the first time since YMO's "Citizens of Science", in a rap-styled lyrical rant.
The breadth of Mosdell's lyrical experimentation during this period led to his first solo recording. This resulted in the 1982 album Equasian,[3] with its use of global ethnic sounds pre-dating the popularity of world music. It was also the first of Mosdell's efforts employing his visual lyrical and compositional technique, VISIC, which he used as the compositional basis for numerous other musical works. Equasian was showcased as an audio-visual/multimedia experience through live performances and a VISIC Exhibition at the Gallery Harajuku in Tokyo. For all its experimentation and relative obscurity, the record's relevance and popularity has continued up through recent times, being reissued as a gate-fold, full-color CD package by Sony in 2003.
International collaborations
During a period of increasing international collaborations, Mosdell travelled to Los Angeles to work with pop singer Boy George. They worked together on two single cuts ("Fireboy Meets His Match" and "All Prayers are Answered") for a Japanese shōchū television commercial that, although released for a few weeks, was suddenly withdrawn after the singer's brush with heroin.
In the same city, pop singer Michael Jackson recorded a cover of YMO's "Behind the Mask" for inclusion on his 1982 Thriller album.[2] Producer Quincy Jones had heard the Yellow Magic Orchestra version on a trip to Japan and played it to Jackson, who decided to turn it from an electro-pop song into a dance-funk version, with additional lyrics by Jackson. Mosdell has said of the collaboration, "when Michael Jackson took it, it made it into a love song about a woman. It was a completely different premise to me, I was talking about a very impersonal, socially controlled society, a future technological era, and the mask represented that immobile, unemotional state. But hey, I let him have that one."[2] An agreement to share the royalties equally between Sakamoto, Mosdell and Jackson broke down when the management of Yellow Magic Orchestra disagreed[2] and it prevented the song to be released on Jackson's sixth studio album, Thriller, and remained unreleased for over 25 years.[21]
The Michael Jackson version of the song "Behind The Mask" got its official release on 10 December 2010, as the ninth track on the posthumous album, Michael. It was described by Time magazine[22] as "Michael's finest moment" and by NME[23] as "something remarkable... an absolute revelation... actually brilliant."
The Mosdell-Sakamoto-Jackson version was later picked up by Jackson's keyboardist Greg Phillinganes for his 1984 album Pulse, and by Eric Clapton, for his August album, released in 1986.
"Sticky Music", was another international chart success for Mosdell, performed by Sandii and the Sunsetz, as it rose to Number 3 on the Australian Top 40 pop chart in 1983. His lyrics to date were published in Ink Music: The Collected Lyrics of Chris Mosdell.
His popularity as a Tokyo-based English writer also led him to write for numerous Japanese television commercials, often collaborating with former Sadistic Mika Band lead vocalist and guitarist Kazuhiko Katō.
During this time he again teamed up with Yukihiro Takahashi to write songs for the albums Ego (1988) and Broadcast from Heaven (1990).
In 2003 Sarah Brightman recorded the song When Firebirds Sing, an operatic opus set in ancient Japan and included on her album Harem.[24] The song was commissioned for the popular PlayStation 2 game Tengai Makyo III (2004). The lyrics themselves depict the tale of lovers from the Land of Curved Fire and the Sea of Desires, who are symbolised by firebirds, their wings intertwined, that circle immortally in a celestial orbit.[25]
In 2008 Chris teamed up with long-time collaborator Kazuhiko Katō for a new glam-rock band, Vitamin Q, releasing one album 'Vitamin Q featuring ANZA'.[26] Chris Mosdell opened the show for their debut live performance at Shibuya AX.
In 2009 Mosdell travelled to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca, Peru, to visit locations adjoined to his Fingerprints of the Gods installation soundtrack, and onward to Santiago, Chile to meet the German composer Uwe Schmidt (Atom™), who had covered several of Mosdell's songs on his Senor CoconutYellow Fever! album. The meeting led to a collaboration on Schmidt and Masaki Sakamoto's album Alien Symphony (2010)[27] with the lyricist penning the song 5.17 Minutes with Miss Eternity.
In 2010 Mosdell began working with the photographer Yuriko Takagi on an adaption of the 10th-century Japanese poetry anthology Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets), producing a new "Shibuya version". Based on the original anthology's conversion in the 15th century into a card game, traditionally played in Japan on New Year Day's, this new bilingual photographic/verse edition selected one hundred citizens from the streets of Shibuya with Mosdell transcribing the voices of these "contemporary poets" into a modern idiom.
The song was released as a single on 21 February 2011, with the music video released on 14 June.[28] The PV features a collection of hundreds of fan messages singing the track Chris originally wrote with the Yellow Magic Orchestra.
In 2012 he wrote Swan Song for Coppe's Rays USB and CD box set release, Cinderella City for female rock guitarist Risu'sBright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed album, and Our Children's Rainsong for the singer/composer Akino Arai – a song especially commissioned to document the atmospheric radiation contamination after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
In 2014, continuing his long song writing partnership with guitarist Makoto Ayukawa of Sheena & The Rokkets, Mosdell wrote the title track to the group's latest album Rokket Ride, together with the song Rock Fox. He also worked once again with Uwe Schmidt (Atom™) to write Beethoven in Antennae, a song for Coppe's upcoming album.
To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Mosdell was commissioned to write the poetic treatment and scenario for the Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival 2014.[29] Performed by the ensemble Enso Watt, and composed and conducted by the Yannick Paget of the Kansai City Philharmonic Orchestra, a "Rite of Summer" and "Rite of Autumn" were held in Kyoto's Urban Guild. To complete the cycle of rites, two additional performances are scheduled for 2015.
Mosdell words were used in alternative forms when he wrote the lyrics to Shake the Whole World to Its Foundations, a work that has evolved from a mixed Japanese-Western orchestral setting to an electronic techno version. It was eventually published in its entirety in book form in 2001 (Shichosha), together with the work of the experimental calligraphy artist Joichi Yoshikawa. Its first version, however, was written to reflect the rhythmical influence of the African continent and recorded by the West African kora player Toumani Diabate in 1992 for the album "Shake the Whole World to Its Foundations".[30] Mosdell wrote a series of chants (eventually numbering one thousand) based on the oral poetry of the Ainu whereby, instead of having a fixed lyrical base to a song, he could dip into a pool of "chants" and select those favoured for the composition—this eventually leading to infinite lyrical variations within a fixed musical format.
Continuing this method of lyrical composition, Mosdell started the solo project, Squawk: The Song of the Violinnet, though following the financial decline of the Smokey Studios in Ginza, none of the recorded songs was ever distributed. However the effort did result in Mosdell's collaboration with the American artists Jore Park and Wylci Fables, who produced enormous "birdhead boys" depicting the characters. Using a painting technique similar to batik but on waxed Japanese washi paper, vast stained-glass-like art pieces were created—a method that would be used in Mosdell's next project. In 1988 Mosdell collaborated with the poet Shuntarō Tanikawa on a deck of 77 cards in the omikuji fortune-telling tradition of Shinto shrines.[3]The Oracles of Distraction, are similar in style to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies; however, rather than being instructional they are intended to distract the reader with juxtaposed images and sound. Mosdell wrote a "distractive" poem for each "oracle" in English, while Tanikawa wrote the reverse side in Japanese. Jore Park and Wylci Fables created accompanying 77 washi-painted panels. Musician Yu Imai then worked alongside other studio performers with Mosdell to create 77 audio sketches using Mosdell's VISIC compositional method. The efforts were combined into a CD box set of text, audio and visual imagery intended to be used in conjunction. Users were instructed to randomly select a numbered card to read and view, and to simultaneously play the CD track of the same number.
While Mosdell was moving to Paris and commuting to Japan, The Oracles of Distraction was presented at Laforet Museum in Harajuku, Tokyo.[3]Sony developed a sound system enabling visitors to wear wireless headphones and walk under motion-triggered canopies that would beam random selections of audio to the headphones to accompany the text selections highlighted on towering, illuminated paintings by Park and Fables. The museum was designed like a Shinto shrine, with attendants dressed in traditional regalia, and visitors selected their own personal oracle from among 77 different entrance tickets.
The Ink of Tokyo
In 1988 Mosdell's LAA . . . The Dangerous Opera Begins was published (Soseisha)—a narrative poem in seven acts with a theatrical structure. Influenced by the Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gozo and his technique of writing whilst walking, Mosdell envisaged a spectacular prima donna, wearing huge eccentric headdresses, whose voice changed with each new outfit in which she appeared. Gozo wrote that Mosdell's work was "The Ink of Tokyo––beautiful, beautiful, this spirit, this sea."[31]
In 1989 Writing the Riot Act in the Illiterate Hour: New and Selected Lyrics (Shichosha) was published––an edition including additional poems from five Japanese poets (Shuntarō Tanikawa, Yoshimasu Gozo, Kazuko Shiraishi, Hiromi Ito and Makoto Oka) who gave their own personal poetic interpretations of Mosdell's lyrics.
He was also commissioned[31] to write the theme song for the Social Democratic Party of Japan for the 1990 political election, resulting in the single "One World", an ensemble piece featuring an assortment of vocalists and session musicians.[3]
Mosdell again collaborated with the calligraphy artist Juichi Yoshikawa, producing a bilingual publication, The Erotic Odes: A Pillow Book.[3] Erotic shunga woodcut prints were used to illuminate the 48 (the number of sexual positions in traditional Japanese society) haiku-like poems, as were new creations by Yoshikawa. Shuntarō Tanikawa, together with Rie Terada, translated the poems and the shunga themselves were selected from a collection of Tanikawa's father Tetsuzō Tanikawa. The full-color edition, originally published by Libroport in 1997, was reissued in 2008 by Seigensha. Yoshikawa and Mosdell further collaborated on the full text printing of Shake the Whole World to Its Foundations.
Continuing to write lyrics for film soundtracks, Mosdell next wrote "From the Ruins of Your Beautiful Body" for the theme song to Marc Rigaudis' adaptation of his short story, "She Was So Pretty". The film featured Nana Okumura, former Miss Universe Japan 1998, and dealt with bullying in Japanese schools.
In 2009 Japanese holographic artist Hatsune Miku released 'Hatsune Miku Orchestra,' featuring covering versions of Mosdell's songs 'La Femme Chinoise,' 'Behind The Mask' and 'Nice Age.'[32]
Installation and live performance
In 1999 Mosdell was asked by producer Shozo Tsurumoto to convey through sound the prehistorical view set forth by Graham Hancock in his book Fingerprints of the Gods.[31] Using the gallery setting once more, the project saw the scaled recreation of Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, and the Great Pyramid of Giza, among many other monuments, within an installation environment. It was underscored by what Art Director Kevin Hamilton coined "audio poems", sonically recreating peak events within the timeline such as an Apache Indian reading a bible[31] and amounting to an unusual audio-only project for a lyricist. It was shown in Tokyo and Osaka, and again paired Mosdell with long-time musical collaborator Yu Imai.
In 2000 Mosdell was invited by the Institute of Tagore Studies and Research at Visva-Bharati University (Santiniketan, West Bengal) for a six-month sojourn at India's "Abode of Peace", established by Rabindranath Tagore as an experimental school for literature and dance. Mosdell performed and under the spell of the lush and colourful environment wrote a new series of poems based on the 108 names of Krishna and the tripartite mystical utterance of the Upanisads. Titled Thirty-Three Billion Songs on the Road of Reincarnations: The Santiniketan Sutra (after the number of gods in the Hindu pantheon), the work is in stark contrast to his Tokyo output, subdued and calm. The book was published by Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters in 2008.[33]
By the next year Mosdell relocated his secondary home from Paris to Boulder, Colorado, and began a series of spoken word performances that resulted in his being awarded the Grand Prize for Poetry at the Colorado Festival of Literature,[2] and a distribution deal to compile his lyrical works into a new publication, Splatterhead (Emerson's Eye, 2000). Extending the format of the poetry reading to include live audio/video mixing with visual artist David Fodel and techno DJ E23, Mosdell toured various cities through 2001 with his "tongue-drum delirium" ensemble, Splatterhead & The Oblivion Brotherhood. The trio later released a techno version of "Shake The World" as a single for the politically inspired electronic music compilation Polyphonic Voices of Digital Dissent.[34]
Returning to Tokyo, Mosdell was one of a hundred local artists invited to contribute artefacts to the Millennium Time Capsule, an event held at the Laforet Museum, Harajuku.[3] Each artist was given a time capsule and asked to place in it representations of their work that best depicted the city of Tokyo at the turn of the 20th century. Mosdell chose his notebooks, with page after page of densely written descriptions of his Eastern odyssey, and a selection of the pens that he had used for numerous lyrical projects including a pen embossed with an alien with which he wrote his Thrills in Voidville series with, and his "nude nib"", a pen carved in the figure of a woman that he used whilst composing The Erotic Odes.
Mosdell was commissioned to script the theatrical scenario for an updated Anglo-Japanese variation of the ancient Japanese epic, Amaterasu.[7] Titled The Sun Goddess: The Resurrection of Radiance, the masked dance drama was performed as part of the "Japan Year in Britain" celebration, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane from 26–28 May 2001.[7] In collaboration with designer/director Tomio Mohri, choreographer Cathy Marston and the City Ballet of London, taiko drummer Miyuki Ikeda, model/actress Sayako Yamaguchi, and composer Kazuhiko Katō (of Sadistic Mika Band), the play depicts the origins of music and dance. Written in blank verse with a British cast of Shakespearean actors, it employed techniques from the traditional stage of kabuki to innovative choreography, and melded into the stage setting other aspects of contemporary media.
By 2006, to coincide with the publication of City of Song, his epic depiction of characters from the twenty-three ku, or wards, of Tokyo, Mosdell had updated his spoken word performances to include a full mixed-culture ensemble, The Incendiary Orchestra.[10] Featuring koto composer/performer, Michiyo Yagi, violinist Edgar Kautzner, tabla player Andy Matzukami, and translator Rie Terada, the live performances were held in various places around Tokyo, and were recorded on video as part of a documentary about Mosdell's artistic history, titled Ink Music: In the Land of the Hundred-Tongued Lyricist, slated for release in 2009.
2015 was the 70th year since the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to commemorate the tragedy Mosdell wrote and performed his poem "The Flame of the Golden Flower" at events at the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Chion-in Temple in Kyoto and Zojo-ji Temple in Tokyo. The event, organized by "Earth Caravan 2015", a global peace initiative, was to carry a flame, originally kindled from the atomic bomb fires, to cities touched by the horrors of war. The poem has been translated into seven languages, and was read throughout Europe on the flame's journey to its final destination of Jerusalem.[35]
Ink Music: The Movie
A film about Chris Mosdell's life, titled "Ink Music: In the Land of the Hundred-Tongued Lyricist" was released in 2009.[9] It was produced by Denver's Brian Comerford, a volunteer producer at KGNU radio who has been running the Electronic Air show since 1995. Comerford said of the production, "He's worked with the who's who of all these major names in Japanese pop culture, from the music scene to calligraphy artists to fashion designers to stage directors to the largest broadcasting company... everyone in Japan knows his work, and yet no one there knows who he is."[2]
Under the nickname "Mozz", Mosdell has produced a series of three books under Goofy Guru Publishing, based in Boulder, Colorado. Mosdell has described the books as his "alter ego, to balance out his heavy, abstract, psychedelic and often obscure poetry.[2]" The books have been described by The Japan Times as Spike Milligan-esque.[3]
Three books have been released so far, entirely illustrated and written by Mosdell, The Pearls of Wisdumb (2003), In Search of the Holey Whale (2008) and A Fork in the Road (2010). The three were compiled into a box set called Utter Mozzsense (2010).[8]
All three have won awards. The Pearls of Wisdumb won an EVVY Awards for Best Humor,[8] while A Fork in the Road was the winner of the USA Book News "Best Books 2010" Award for Humor.[36]In Search of the Holey Whale won Gold Prize Winner of the Moonbeam Children's Book Award for Poetry.[37]
Winner of the USA Book News "Best Books 2010" Award for Humor[36]
Winner of the 2023 Japan’s Classic Day Cultural Foundation Prize [12]
Related Research Articles
Ryuichi Sakamoto was a Japanese composer, pianist, record producer, and actor who pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto influenced and pioneered a number of electronic music genres.
Yellow Magic Orchestra was a Japanese electronic music band formed in Tokyo in 1978 by Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The group is considered influential and innovative in the field of popular electronic music. They were pioneers in their use of synthesizers, samplers, sequencers, drum machines, computers, and digital recording technology, and effectively anticipated the "electropop boom" of the 1980s. They are credited with playing a key role in the development of several electronic genres, including synthpop, J-pop, electro, and techno, while exploring subversive sociopolitical themes throughout their career.
Haruomi Hosono, sometimes credited as Harry Hosono, is a Japanese musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He is considered to be one of the most influential musicians in Japanese pop music history, credited with shaping the sound of Japanese pop for decades as well as pop music outside of Japan. He also inspired genres such as city pop and Shibuya-kei, and as the leader of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, contributed to the development and pioneering of numerous electronic genres.
Yukihiro Takahashi was a Japanese musician, singer, record producer, fashion designer, and actor, who was best known internationally as the drummer, lead vocalist, & 2nd keyboardist of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, as the former drummer of the Sadistic Mika Band, and as the drummer & backing vocalist of the Sadistics. He was also a member of the groups: the Beatniks, Sketch Show, & Metafive.
×∞Multiplies is a mini-album and the third studio album by Yellow Magic Orchestra released in 1980. It contains a mixture of songs and instrumentals by YMO, interspersed with comedy sketches. These sketches are performed by Snakeman Show in both Japanese and English, with YMO participating in some of them.
BGM is the fourth studio album by Yellow Magic Orchestra, released on March 21, 1981. The title stands for "Background music", though Japanese TV and press advertising alternately used "Beautiful Grotesque Music". This album was produced by Haruomi Hosono. Recording started on January 15, 1981, in an effort to release the album by March 21, 1981. The album was the first of any kind to feature the Roland TR-808, one of the earliest programmable drum machines; YMO had already been the first band to use the device, featuring it on-stage as early as 1980. In addition to the TR-808, this was also their first studio album recorded with the Roland MC-4 Microcomposer.
Solid State Survivor is the second album by Japanese electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra, released in 1979. Later, Solid State Survivor was released in 1982 in the UK on LP and cassette, also in 1992 in the United States on CD, but many of the songs from this album were compiled for release in the US as the US pressing of ×∞Multiplies (1980), including the tracks "Behind the Mask", "Rydeen", "Day Tripper", and "Technopolis". Solid State Survivor is only one of a handful of YMO albums in which the track titles do not have a Japanese equivalent.
Technodelic is the fifth studio album by Yellow Magic Orchestra, released in 1981. The album is notable for its experimental approach and heavy use of digital samplers which were not commonly used until the mid-to-late 1980s, resulting in a more minimalist and avant-garde sound compared to their previous work.
After Service is the second live album by Yellow Magic Orchestra, directly following their final studio album, Service. The album features former ABC member David Palmer on additional drums. A film version was released alongside the album. After Service features "Kageki na Shukujo", which was released in a studio version as a single, but does not feature on any of their albums.
Service is the seventh studio album by Yellow Magic Orchestra, released on December 14, 1983. The band dissolved the following year after a world tour, but would later reform in 1993 for a one-off reunion album, Technodon. Like ×∞Multiplies, it contains a mixture of YMO songs and comedy sketches performed by Super Eccentric Theater, or S.E.T. The first Dutch/German edition of the album shortened the sketches to ten-second interludes, effectively cutting the album's length in half. In 1999, the album was remastered under Hosono's supervision with new liner notes provided by lyricist Peter Barakan.
Shuntarō Tanikawa is a Japanese poet and translator. He is considered to be one of the most widely read and highly regarded of living Japanese poets, both in Japan and abroad. The English translation of his poetry volume Floating the River in Melancholy, translated by William I. Eliott and Kazuo Kawamura and illustrated by Yoko Sano, won the American Book Award in 1989.
Sandii & the Sunsetz were a Japanese synthpop band that collaborated from 1979 until the 1990s. The Sunsetz, led by Makoto Kubota, and Sandii started as separate artists, and each has a separate discography. However, their collaboration provided a particular body of work that is representative of the period, and which successfully blended Eastern, Western and pop influences.
YMO Versus The Human League is an EP released in Japan and Asia in April 1993. It was released by Alfa Records and is a collaboration between Japanese electropop/synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra and British new wave/synthpop band The Human League. It was the first release by The Human League after their abrupt dismissal from their 14-year-long recording contract with Virgin Records 10 months previously.
UC YMO: Ultimate Collection of Yellow Magic Orchestra is a compilation album by Yellow Magic Orchestra. The songs were selected by keyboardist and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto. The album was also released as a premium edition. The premium edition came with a long-sleeved white shirt emblazed with the yMo logo as well as a yMo bandana that the band wore on the 1980 world tour 'From Tokio to Tokyo', along with a special Liner Notes Booklet and an autographed print by drummer and sometimes singer, Yukihiro Takahashi. It was cataloged as MHCL 291-4 and sold in Japan for 21,000 yen.
"Behind the Mask" is a 1979 song by the Japanese synth-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra. The composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, wrote the first version for a television commercial. A new version with lyrics by Chris Mosdell was released on the 1979 Yellow Magic Orchestra album Solid State Survivor. In the US and the UK, "Behind the Mask" was released as a single from the 1980 album X∞Multiplies.
WORLD TOUR 1980 is a live album by Yellow Magic Orchestra. It was recorded during the band's 1980 international tour. This is the only YMO live album to include songs originally released on X∞Multiplies; it also features six songs from YMO members made for other projects and two covers. It was released, with a book with photographs taken during the tour, as both a 2-CD set and a 3-LP set, which had a bonus track. "Jiseiki Hirake Kokoro" was originally made for a Fujifilm cassette commercial. It was included in Snakeman Show's self-titled album in mono so that the lyrics, which reference Fujifilm cassettes, could not be understood properly; it was presented here in stereo, and was included in the UC YMO compilation.
Paraiso is Haruomi Hosono's fourth solo album and Yellow Magic Band's first album. This album continues the tropical style of Hosono House, Tropical Dandy and Bon Voyage co., while being influenced by the music of Hawaii and Okinawa, incorporating electronic sounds that would be later developed on Hosono's and YMO's careers. YMO, The Yellow Magic Band at this point in time, was composed of Tin Pan Alley members and studio musicians, such as Hosono's former Happy End bandmate Shigeru Suzuki and future YMO members Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, as well as guitarist Hirofumi Tokutake.
Sandi A. Hohn, professionally known as Sandii, is a Japanese singer and vocalist who was a member of the Japanese band Sandii & the Sunsetz. Hohn is also notable for her work on the Japanese animated television series Lupin III Part II.
This is the discography of Japanese electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO).
Murdered by the Music, also known as Ongaku Satsujin in Japan, is the second studio album by Japanese multi-instrumentalist Yukihiro Takahashi, released on June 21, 1980 by Seven Seas via King Records. Murdered by the Music was release whilst Takahashi was an active member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. As well as his YMO bandmates Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, and longtime YMO collaborator Hideki Matsutake, the album also features contributions from Sandii and Makoto Ayukawa of Sheena & the Rokkets.
↑ "New Music" (in Japanese). Who.ne.jp. Archived from the original on 3 June 2009. Retrieved 13 June 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) )
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
