Taiso by Yellow Magic Orchestra
This year we lost Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the most influential musicians of the past 45 years. But because he is from Japan, he never became as big as, say, David Bowie. Everybody knows his music, because he composed the score for countless popular movies, like The Last Emperor (in which he played a role too), Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (in which he played opposite David Bowie) and that one movie in which Leonardo Dicaprio is raped by a bear, but I always forget the title of.
Sakamoto always operated on the line between popular and experimental music, between easy listening and alienating soundscapes, and that started with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, a band he formed with two other influential musicians, even more obscure than Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi (the latter died this year too, a few months before Sakamoto)
The Yellow Magic Orchestra stood at the cradle of both J-Pop and all kinds of genres within electronic music and techno, with innovative use of synthesizers, loops and samples, pairing the naive to the artistic. The song in the video above, from 1981, is a perfect example.
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