Haruomi Hosono

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIyZn2UbU4I

popped up in my feed - not sure exactly what it is but John Carroll Kirby is involved

must be from this?

https://fruitandgroovescollective.com/2024/02/21/stones-throw-records-announce-haruomi-hosono-tribute-album/

The World Standard record that Harry produced in 1985 is melodic bliss. Tonally it reminds me of Memphis, Milano but with the landscape covered in snow. At first everything just sounds like the same bright, major-chord, new-agey song. Then I find myself blissing out to some riff that only appears right before a fade-out. Or I notice the crazy celestial section in the back half of the opener. Or I realize that there is a long, sad, dramatic song (like an ambient Mass!) tucked away towards the end of the album. There's even a sermon in Esperanto! And this came out in 1985, the height of Hosono's Monad period.

and it's recently been reissued! pricey though. I kinda forgot about it until now, I love Hosono lending his weird touch to other musicians like this, you can tell his production style right off the bat. track #8 pops into my head a lot, its like one of those upbeat Penguin Cafe Orchestra tunes that always lifts your mood up

Country Gazette is also worth a listen, I don't think Hosono is involved but the concept of it (ambient musician who's never been to America makes an instrumental country album based on 50's Americana) very much sounds like something he would do

I was just reading about the other World Standard records today and, he was! Country Gazette is one of the three with Hosono production. He even put a new original song on it.

Are the Interior and Inoyama Land records this good?

It's one of the relentlessly fun things about the Hosono catalogue: every time I get wise to one of these epic production jobs, I think, "The hell! My idea of his body of work has been woefully insufficient!! And I call him my favorite artist?!"

I really like both those Interior and Inoyama Land albums. They're up on YT if curious.

yeah both are great, as good as the World Standard album in my view. if you like those I'd also get the album re.sort by Sora - this time I know for a fact that Hosono wasn't involved, but it's exactly the sort of thing he would've produced in 2003 I think

here are, in my view, the best tracks from each:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cONpVBAv8E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwRKd9-m1YM

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

all those yen records box sets have lots of cool stuff in them, highly recommended

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LwA7I6Vs8M

i've got that on my phone, along with the six disc set of songs he wrote/produced for others, such an incredible amount of good shit in there, always fun when something you haven't heard yet comes up on shuffle

BIG rec for inoyamaland if you're into that cluster/harmonia sound

yeah mr nununu might as well do yourself a favor now and get both those Harmonia albums, you're bound to stumble on them eventually

I love the Cluster & Eno record -- I gather the Harmonia stuff is along those lines? Will look into that soon. (Incidentally, I was reading a recent Inoyama Land interview and one of the guys says Cluster & Eno is his favorite album of all time.) (And another by the way, I appreciate all the Kraftwerk suggestions above. Got three songs lined up to hear when the time is right.) (Also ripped all four YT videos above and slotted them onto my almost-broken walkman, so those'll get heard real soon.) (A Japanese comment on the Hosono song: "If you're from abroad and listening to this... you're some enthusiast!")

its better

Who is the "G.Miller" that wrote "Japanese Rhumba" according to the Paraiso liner notes?

Gerald
https://voices.pitt.edu/TeachersGuide/Unit8/JapaneseRumba.htm

Cool, thanks! I'd figured it was Hosono having fun with a piece of orientalism but the Japanese lyrics threw me.

Would listen to a comp of japanese GI songs.

Harry didn't write Fujiyama Mama either :)

Yeah i wonder if there is a comp around

Yah I knew that from that awesome Rhino 50's Rock & Roll box :)

Rhino should have made a GI songs box too.

But the Japanese verse in Fujiyama Mama IS Hosono's own, I think. The raunchiest of them all, as it happens.

I loved all the tracks linked just above, by the way (the other mid-'80s ambient productions, and that gloriously weird and edgy Hosono solo instrumental version of the Three Kingdoms song I knew as a vocal song from the 20th Century Pops box). Lately I'm busy being blown away by Medicine Compilation...

spiritual New Age is one of those things that's probably never coming back but yes HH was very good at it

still love to revisit this video every once in a while, very amused by the fact that once upon a time something like this could be a hit. can't question HH's dedication to it either I mean check out that ponytail. hopefully a reissue of this album isn't out of the question

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2safm8

also "Asatoya Yunta" is a traditional Okinawan folk song, so that's actually 3 covers on Paraiso. given 1978 was also the year of Cochin Moon, Pacific, and the YMO debut I guess he may not have had a whole lot of time for songwriting :) I actually have a few versions of that tune, I think if you compare it to Sakamoto's on Beauty you can hear the difference in how these guys think. RS's is really pretty and immaculately arranged of course, but HH is the one who really extracts the magic from it, doing it in a way that I'm guessing hadn't really been done before

In case anybody doubts my level of nerdy dedication to the Yellow Magic Orchestra cosmos, here's some actual math I did the other week. I was wondering whether, considering all those Paraiso covers, HoSoNoVa might not be a songwriting statement equal to Paraiso. Turns out, it isn't. But it's not *that* far off either. Okay and here's the math:

PARAISO
Tracklist space: 33% covers, 67% originals
Runtime: 25% covers, 75% originals

HOSONOVA
Tracklist space: 42% covers, 58% originals
Runtime: 40% covers, 60% originals

hah, I actually didn't know there were any originals on Hosonova. dunno if I've listened to that more than once though.

The video of Love, Peace & Trance is so good! I had no idea *that's* what that album would sound like. Really excited to explore Hosono's '90s now.

Are people here aware that he wrote and recorded a whole album for Chisato Moritaka in 1998? Basically everything but the actual vocals is him. And whatever instrumentation isn't him, is Miharu Koshi helping out. I've only let myself try the last two tracks so far but they both kick ass.

I love HoSoNoVa, frogbs (I let myself break with chronology because I was so curious what all the rearrangements on Flying Saucer 1947 would be like, and so fell in love with that album, and instantly needed more of that era...) It feels like he's come back full circle to his Happy End sound -- which I know is not what most people here love Hosono for, though. The covers are charming (if delivered very straight... probably too straight... but then again, I say that without having investigated the originals) but the originals are just great pieces of work. Catchy, atmospheric, sweet, heartfelt.

second disc is basically alternate versions of most of the album's themes - faster tempos, different instruments, stuff like that. one of them is a take on "Birdoj" from Endless Talking which confirms my suspicion that it was written for the soundtrack. the last 4 tracks are previously unheard compositions I think, one of which has a choir. last track is sort of a disco thing, it's hilariously weird

Gotta figure out if this is online somewhere. Just rewatched Night on the Galactic Railroad and not only can I confirm that Birdoj is on there, pretty much exactly as we hear it on The Endless Talking; it turns out Mercury Fall is also on the soundtrack. And there's a supremely beautiful track towards movie's end that I haven't heard elsewhere. Maybe it's on this CD2.

And by "on the soundtrack" I mean "in the film." Really gotta make a habit of stepping away from my ILX posts for five minutes before I hit "submit."

it might be - track 10 on the bonus CD could be it, it's the same tune but it sounds less 'sharp', almost as though it was played on a different model of keyboard. a lot of the second disc is like that, they don't feel like 'new' arrangements as much as they do the same tunes from the soundtrack transposed onto a different set of sounds. but there are some new takes on the title theme. it's not essential exactly but you may find it amusing. I can zip it to you if you like. otherwise it may be on Soulseek.

A zip would be great! I haven't managed to get Soulseek to work out here.

Speaking of 1985, Paradise View goes on climbing my list of favorites. Full of beautiful, eerie melodies.

And yeah, innarestingly, a lot of the songs that are actually played in the film are *not* quite the same arrangement that's on the soundtrack album.

77 years old today!

someone should invite him to the 77 board.

I was working on Happy End translations and thinking about him all day, so that works out. Hope he had a great day too.

Loving this 1985 song from the 20th Century Pops box:

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

that sounds more like a YT production to me! except...all the odd chords and strange halting noises. great tune, I should really give that box a full listen.

It's overwhelming but I've yet to find a song on there that I don't enjoy.

Finally reissued:

https://www.discogs.com/release/31233583-Linda-Carriere-Linda-Carriere-by-Haruomi-Hosono-Produced

real excited to hear that one

Same. Hosono noted recently that if that Carriere album had come out, there would probably have been no YMO -- he would've leaned fully into the production work!

You guys know the Country Pumpkin album? Hosono production from 1972 that the awesome alternate version of Owari no Kisetsu on the 20th Century Pops Box comes from. I just learned that the closer (starts at 28:56) is actually also a Hosono original, exclusive to this album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTGJjm3I1M

Oh wow. From the Bob Dylan interview site, Flagging Down the Double E's, talking with a poet who visited the USSR with Dylan in 1985:

--Were you a big Dylan fan going into this?--

Oh God, yeah. I knew the songs he was singing.

In 1977, I got a call to go to Tokyo to do a jazz album based on ten of my poems, which would have been the lyrics. I flew there with Linda Carriere, the lead singer for Dynasty, which was a big group at the time. We did the album, and Kimiko Kasai, their biggest recording star at the time, covered three of the songs. Tatsuro Yamashita, who wrote some of the music on that album, he covered three. So for about ten years or so, I was getting a lot of royalties based on their performances of my lyrics in their songs. As a result, Linda’s version was not released. Now, 47 years later, they’re releasing the album, Alfa.

In any case, Dylan knew this part of me. That was a good thing, because he knew I would understand everything he’s going through. “You’re into music? You did an album?” That was another thing that brought us together, that I had something to do with music.

That's poet(/lyricist) James Ragan.

that's really cool, think I'm just gonna order a copy, you know it's gonna be good

I did not know the Country Pumpkin album. I'm listening now - is that last track really him? can't say I've ever heard *that* side of Hosono before.

I hear there are lyric translations for Hosono House in the LITA reissue, but if (like me) you don't have it, or if you're interested in an alternate take, here are my own translations. The lyrics on this album are fantastic. Working on Boku wa Chotto, I was crying like a baby.

I'm curious whether Hosono ever got confessional again -- maybe in the late albums (Flying Saucer 1947, HoSoNoVa, Vu Ja De), those all those have a few originals each, but I haven't dug into the lyrics yet. There's some straightforward honesty towards the end of Paraiso, but from Tropical Dandy on, Hosono veered mostly into storytelling and/or just being silly.

Come to think of it, maybe all the (silly) love songs on Philharmony were confessional too (Chaos Panic too, same era). And Gradated Gray, surely.

Anyway, the words on this album are fucking killer. I precede everything with self-indulgent (/and maybe sometimes interesting) commentary but/so scroll downwards if it's just lyrics you're after.

A1 Rock-a-Bye, My Baby
A2 I'm Sort Of
A3 Choo-Choo! And the Clattering Train
A4 The Season of the End
A5 Crossing the Winter

B1 Party
B2 Fortune, Come In! Demons, Get Out!
B3 No Fixed Abode, Jobless, Barely Making Any Money
B4 Love is the Color of Peach Flowers
B5 The Rose and the Wild Beast
B6 Sharing an Umbrella

thank you so much for doing these, it's kinda hilarious to compare to the titles I've got...I have B3 as "No Address, No Job, Very Little Income"

one fun bit of trivia I just learned is the director for the commercial "Normandia" was used in specifically asked him to compose something like Sakamoto. I'd say he did a pretty admirable job but it still sounds like Harry.

Sakamoto heard the commercial Normandia was in and thought, "What the fuck? This sounds a lot like me. Who the hell would ape my style this way?"

But that's not even the end of the story. There's a Hosono tribute album that came out yeaaaaars later (Strange Songbook, I think, which also has Takahashi's killer cover of Sports Men) and who should appear on it, covering Normandia? Ryuichi himself.

Frog, is that LITA's version? Their title sounds more elegant than mine. I couldn't resist alluding to the Muir translation of Kafka's Worries of a Family Man.

Also, I've begun to think that maybe the Miharuomi stuff (Hosono + Koshi) is my favorite of all Hosono's epic collaborations -- over Happy End (whom I adore) and maybe even over YMO... granted, with Hosono it's all god-tier anyway, so why bother with comparisons? But those Hosono-produced Koshi albums, and all her guest spots on Hosono solo songs, just crush me. Of course it might just be the flush of infatuation-in-early-stages that makes me say so. But in any case the Miharuomi body of work is *at least as good* as Happy End and YMO, despite being a whole lot less famous/celebrated.

But back to the Normandia topic again -- yes, it does sound to me more like a Nokto de la Galaksia Fervojo outtake than anything truly Sakamotian! Hosono's melodic touch is too distinct.

Today is the one-year-anniversary of the start of my Hosono/YMO/etc obsession. I've hardly listened to anything else all year. It all started with frogbs and then was deeply and constantly nourished by the various ILM threads relating to this universe, so -- thank you all so very much. Who knew the world had this much more joy in it. And here's to (I expect) year two of the same.