Yellow Magic Orchestra

Yellow Magic Orchestra — Haruomi Hosono (bass), Yukihiro Takahashi (drums, lead vocals), and Ryuichi Sakamoto (keyboards) — formed in Tokyo in 1978 and became synth-pop's Japanese pole star: proto-techno grooves Afrika Bambaataa would sample for "Planet Rock," with programmer Hideki Matsutake and his Roland MC-8 as the acknowledged "fourth member." The nine albums on this shelf run the whole arc, from the 1978 debut to the December 1983 Budokan farewell (a "sankai" — a scattering, not quite a breakup, they insisted). Takahashi and Sakamoto both died in 2023, weeks apart. One seller had the whole run and I was trying to minimize shipping — and I like this era of late-seventies, early-eighties electronic music. I enjoy playing these. A lot of early computer music is beeps and boops; sometime in the seventies a lot of it got a beat and a melody, which made it listenable more than once.

9 physical works