Although YMO In their native Japan, after an advertising deal with the cassette manufacturer Fuji, they were more famous than the Beatles and at least as famous as Buddha, so the group decided to boldly venture into new dimensions: “Technodelic” is the first pop album whose framework is almost completely gone composed of loops and samples.
Machines like the LMD-649 sampler were so brand new that the electronic pioneers could only have had time to scan the manual. The fact that Hosono and Sakamoto had been experimenting with synthesizers of all stripes since their art college days in the early 1970s was now paying off. In combination with Takahashi’s drums recorded live, the ten songs in 43 minutes anticipated everything that was to happen in the field of electronic music in the next 15 years, from new wave (“Pure Jam”) to electro-funk (” Seoul Music”), Industrial (“Neue Tanz”) to IDM (“Light In Darkness”).
The trio finally emancipated themselves from the already misleading Kraftwerk comparisons. YMO also tried to combine electronic avant-garde and pop, but on the other side of the globe they came up with solutions that were more complex, more playful and also a lot more danceable than those of their Düsseldorf colleagues (of whom Sakamoto, Takahashi and Hosono are admittedly big fans were).
While Kraftwerk played with the cliché of the cold, efficient, but somewhere in the engineer’s heart also romantic German, YMO served the stereotype of the high-energy plastic planet Japan, which appeared both colorful and unsettling from the outside. The best western references are Brian Eno and David Byrne’s “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts”, which was released a few months earlier, and the Talking Heads in general, which YMO even used for the gymnastics video for the single “Taiso”. worked together.
Despite intricate rhythms and nerve-wracking sounds, “Technodelic” couldn’t interrupt the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s triumphal march. A year after its release, no one in Japan had sold more records than them. And while the band took an almost ten-year break from 1984, their sound found its way into the first hip-hop jams via the DJ sets of Afrika Bambaataa and also into Detroit’s underground clubs, where the four-four time beat from the ubiquitous Roland TR -808 drum machine has been hardened into dystopian techno.