Songs that sample Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO)

The merch stall was very tempting, lots of nice solo stuff there including whaqt looked like a Hosono box set of early stuff, pity I'm skint Waaaah!

So, after a bit of nosing about I've sussed that what we saw was by all intents and purposes a HASYMO concert, interpolating YMO songs (Ongaku, Rydeen, Help Yourself) and various Sketch Show and Sakamoto (that awful anti-war song) songs with newer actual HASYMO songs like Rescue (which was the 'Get your mind right, progress or regress' one.)

it looked as if ryu was playing then looping certain keyboard phrases, in "rydeen" for instance it looked like he played the first verse live on the xylophone, then moved to his larger keyboard for the rest of the song while the main xylophone riff still played.

"riot in lagos" sounded amazing. i thought it was a great show, but some of the sloganeering was fairly misguided.

Right well I've been talking about the show with my Japanese missus (who was there too). She reckons that from the Japanese point of view, just performing a retro greatest hits show would be insulting the audience in a way by not bothering to come up with something new. This is especially relevant because YMO were always known for being futuristic anyway, and looking to the past would go against their initial reason for existing. This is just a wildly different point of view to what we're used to in Europe or America or wherever (I'm trying not to say "the west"), where the vogue has gone more and more towards those Don't Look Back concerts or reformation greatest hits shows.

Don't know if this is actually the case, but food for thought I suppose.

Z S, I agree with your assessment of the Soul Train interview, though I believe Yukihiro said "Of course, soul"--and I think Don actually understood what he said. But yeah, his whole "look at these funny foreigners" attitude toward the band made me cringe hard. And him calling Kraftwerk a "record"...LOL.

As for the recent YMO gig, it sounds about what I'd expect if it actually was billed as HASYMO. If it was YMO, then, yeah, I would have expected to hear more classics. I'd love to see a video of them doing "Ongaku"! One of their greatest tracks.

Viola! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFs880dNtmM

A couple of years ago I bought, from E-Bay, a load of these awesome (of maybe slightly dodgy provenance) Chinese or Taiwanese DVDs of most of the YMO video material that came out in the 80s (79 and 80 World tour stuff, video collections, a Budokan gig and the Technodon gig), last night made me dig 'em out and have a YMO splurge.

thanks for the reviews everyone. I get the feeling I would have liked this show, I kinda like the HASYMO youtubes I've seen.

love that new version of ongaku, I want to have easy listening nightmares

So here's the official setlist that I got from the Commons blog:

Yellow Magic Orchestra
15 JUNE, 2008
at Royal Festival Hall/LONDON

01: I-SHIN-DEN-SHIN
02: SPORTSMEN
03: FLY ME TO THE RIVER
04: MARS
05: FLAKES
06: RIOT IN LAGOS
07: ONGAKU
08: RESCUE
09: TURN TURN
10: TOKYO TOWN PAGES
11: THE CITY OF LIGHT
12: SUPREME SECRET
13: WONDERFUL TO ME
14: TIBETAN DANCE
15: WAR AND PEACE
16: RYDEEN 79/07

ENCORE-1
CHRONOGRAPH

ENCORE-2
CUE

That actually looks like a great setlist to me. Hopefully all of these are up on Youtube (MaresNest, I haven't clicked your link yet, so they may be!). "Sportsmen" is one of my favorite Hosono songs, and I can imagine what it would have sounded like at the show because Takahashi covered (and contemporized it) on the recent Hosono tribute album.

Oh, and here's the blog I was talking about (thanks Paul!). It's got some nice pics of the YMO crew.

http://commmons.com/staff_blog/index.php

The Soul Train with YMO played over the weekend and we TIVO'd; Robin can't stop watching it.

Guardian review:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/06/meltdown_a_magical_evening.html

still so funny that clapton covered "behind the mask"

...and really, really badly.

fucking hell, has anyone else heard the human league's drum n bass cover of "kimi ni mune kyun"???

"Kimi ni Mune Kyun" was also covered by Jan Linton,and who under the name "dr jan guru" made releases with Bill Nelson, Masami Tsuchiya and Richard Barbieri of Japan. These are hard to track down as most of the releases seem to come out in Japan only but I ve found some downloads at a UK site www.burningshed.com/store/janlinton and on itunes.
"Sequential sakura" which is co-credited to Barbieri, really reminds me of YMO at times too, quite nice.

Here's their 2010 World Happiness setlist:

Lotus Love (Hosono on vocals)
Daytripper
ONGAKU
TAISO (Sakamoto Ryuichi sang through a loudspeaker, issuing orders to two male dancers who joined the band onstage for this number)
Thousand Knives
Behind The Mask
Tibetan Dance
Thank You For Talkin’ To Me Africa (with Crystal Kaye on vocals)
Rydeen
Fire Cracker
Encore: Hello Goodbye (Takahashi Yukihiro on vocals)

This seems a lot more like the kind of set most of you were expecting. Been youtubing a few of these and found it pretty good. For the record I really did like their 2008 sets with mostly Sketch Show material, though I understand that they were kind of dull. Stuff like "Mars" and "Flakes" work well on the record but they don't make sense live. And yeah I could definitely go without hearing Sakamoto's "War and Peace" again.

https://youtu.be/m_ds-XKtVds

Does anyone know if this is an authorized sample

wow

its viper so absolutely not

what about this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS1HEhfIuLA

look if it introduces a bunch of teenage shitposters to the magic of YMO then I'm ok with it

21k views in a day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sg7Qh8uzSw

lmao

what the fuck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpXfkU89yIY

absolutely insane discovery

truly, what the fuck

:(