Haruomi Hosono

Alternative 3 is quite something isn't it. This guy!

The main theme of Nokto de la Galaskia Fervojo is so wonderful.

the whole album makes me feel like I got left on the moon or something. there are more moments on it that give me chills than any other album I can think of.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d5/b1/ab/d5b1abde40634df42380ca11f93a154f.jpg

Happy birthday, Mr. Hosono!

How are those remixes frogbs?

I thought the second CD was more cues and variations on the title, no?

I do love the Pleocene adapted theme too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdybb52ejd8

caught one of the NYC shows a month or two ago. I'm not a huge fan of the boogie woogie stuff, but I must say, he really sold it live. total pros, great vibe. and akiko yano came out for one of the encores! that ruled.

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

you can get Cochin Moon on LP for the relatively low price of $22 + shipping, this thing will probably sound incredible on my hi-fi

all I need is Omni Sight Seeing now and I'll be happy

Just picked up the Seaside Lovers album which was mentioned on here a couple of months ago. Such a gorgeous sound.

I've been going back to the Pacific Breeze compilation a lot. My only (very old school) complaint is that it doesn't come with a download code. I'd like to have it on my iTunes as that's still what I use when I'm out and about. Light In The Attic could have thrown one in as it's not like the record was exactly cheap!

If you love Seaside Lovers (which is perfect), do try and track down the whole series, there were six SIR albums (easy to find on youtube):

Sound Image Series:

[1978.06.21] Pacific
[1978.11.21] NEW YORK
[1979.06.01] the AEGEAN SEA (エーゲ海)
[1983.xx.xx] ISLAND MUSIC
[1983.xx.xx] OFF SHORE
[1983.05.21] SEASIDE LOVERS 〜 MEMORIES IN BEACH HOUSE

KM - have you heard The Endless Talking & Coincidental Music yet? it just occurred to me that anyone fascinated by the Muji in-store tape should check out both those albums immediately.

no, and no! i know nothing about them! if it's anything like the Muji tape, it would make for excellent working music. I will seek them out today.

I owe you $1 million bux for all YMO-related tips through the years, thank you

the cover of The Endless Talking looks like joan miro, nice

I have PayPal, you know

do you accept space bux?

title track on Endless Talking is what "Talking" was based on

Coincidental Music also has this take on it (different melody but still similar)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT3fFBe-SpE

that said it's "Memphis, Milano" which is probably my favorite here, which I think was also designed as shopping music

and yeah send me your space wallet code

There's going to be a documentary about Hosono called "No Smoking" to be released in Japan (I think) in November.
Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqD73BPJm7g&feature=youtu.be

No idea where/when/how we'll see this outside of Japan - if there's any chance it would surely be through Light In The Attic I guess, but unlike the Sakamoto doc a couple of years ago I guess his profile still isn't high enough outside of Japan for an international release?

Still haven't seen the Sakamoto doc or its companion "Live At The Armory"(? I think) film. Did they ever make it to home viewing/streaming in the US?

this setlist O.o

Day1「細野さんを歌おう！」みんな集まりました！#細野さん50 pic.twitter.com/EqZtrP6ISC

— 細野さん みんな集まりました！ (@Hosonosan50) October 11, 2019

Fucking hell!

OMG!

whoa, UA! awesome.

man, hope somebody recorded these...

can we talk about how amazing Omni Sight Seeing is for a minute? had a close listen to it last night and now I think it's one of my very favorites of his. I'm trying to piece together what exactly the overarching theme to all this is, it's the one Hosono disc that doesn't seem to follow a particular theme but there does seem to be an attempt at interpreting music from all over the globe and molding it into a strange little Hosono cube. his lyrics tend to be difficult to understand sometimes which obscures what a crazy trip they can be. Here's Orgone Box:

Cloudy!
Make'm go away
Cloudy!
Let Organe clarify
Looming cloud, feeling sad...
At time like this the plague spreads when Mammom comes
Must gotta go
Gaia quivers
the Earth quakes
You can't win, you must lose
and there's no way out of the game
Orgone is a visible, measurable
and applicable energy of a cosmic nature, douzo....
C..CL..LLOOU...DDDY...
the cloud of words
CLOU...LLOOU..DDY
Let Organe clarify
If we do not expect the unexpected, we will never find it...

What ??!?

It *is* amazing and enigmatic!

Pretty straightforward once you get to know about Wilhelm Reich:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone

There’s another (rather more famous) song inspired by the same subject matter:

https://youtu.be/pllRW9wETzw

man there is nothing straightforward about that article

though lmao @ that Mark Mothersbaugh quote

Haruomi Hosono at home just vibing pic.twitter.com/jCalV6NveH

— NTS Radio (@NTSlive) March 25, 2020

O.M.G. <3333

(it suuuuucks that in this day and age a thread bump like this made me think "oh no, plz no corona")

haha, what a prince

I love that clip so much, it's been pinging around the net for a while, when he does the taiso knee raises it cracks me up.

No end to my love for him. He's the embodiment of people who figured out how to live imo.

yesssss

he leads by example

Nice!

Amazing!

over the last 2 months I have listened to every single Haruomi Hosono album. his catalogue is all over the place and it's not all great but the dude really is on a completely different planet. he has this strange rhythmic sense that you can pick out right away.

any new finds from your listening spree?

frogbs, would totally be into a post about your perspective on HH's catalogue.

^^ Seconded!

it's good!

*reviews post*

it checks out! :D

obviously I got a lot of scattered thoughts about the man's work, I think he's fairly unique in the way he'll completely latch onto one style for 4-5 years and then just never do anything like it again. maybe Bowie did this, but his catalogue is way more linear than Hosono's is. I break it down like this:

The Early Stuff - including as a member of Apryl Fool (maybe not worth listening to) and Happy End (which definitely is). his first solo album is fine and I am pretty sure one of the only things to come out of Japan in the early 70's that sounded quite like that, but I never found it all that interesting.

The Exotica Period - starting with Tropical Dandy, with each record getting weirder and more electronic up to Paraiso. I think his unique brand of humor starts to show itself here. These records aren't exactly meant to be taken seriously but they're fascinating. Paraiso as I've probably said before is one of my favorite albums ever. Obviously it was a launching point for YMO.

Cochin Moon - there's nothing like this album out there anywhere, even in Hosono's own catalogue. but you can hear his trademark rhythms start to show themselves. sometimes people point to this as a pre-YMO album but none of YMO's stuff really sounds like this (maybe "Hepatitis" could've landed on the self-titled).

The YMO period - from '79 to '83 everything he touches is gold. not just the YMO stuff (including "Gradated Gray" which is my alltime favorite YMO track) but also his solo and collaborative material. only one solo album but he wrote a boatland of stuff for other artists. you almost have to consider those three Miharu Koshi albums Hosono works as well, his fingerprints are all over them. part of the first two Jun Togawa albums too. lots of stuff on those YEN records comps, including a bunch I've probably never heard. Yukihiro Takahashi was also just killin' it during this period.

Non-Standard - for a few years he started releasing hip-hop/electrofunk records, mostly under the "F.O.E. (Friends of Earth)" name. S-F-X is a pretty decent album (particularly "Body Snatchers", which is wild) and the FOE stuff is entertaining, if not particularly great. his cover of Dr. John's "Right Place, Wrong Time" shows his ability to transform any tune into a weird Hosono thing.

Monad - this stuff overlaps with the Non-Standard material, including about half of the S-F-X record. the 5 albums he did in 1985 (Mercurial Dance, Pacific View, Nokto De La Galaskia Fervojo, The Endless Talking, and Coincidental Music) all form a set to my ears. you can include that weird ass "Watering a Flower" tape in there as well. while not all of this is great he really did tap into something ethereal and otherworldly here. I don't know if anyone else was able to make their synthesizers sound as evocative and strange as he did in that period. Some of the music on Endless Talking is downright freaky. That said it's the Nokto De La Galaskia Fervojo soundtrack that's my favorite, "La Gojo" & "La travida malgojo de Giovanni" are two of the prettiest pieces of music I've ever heard in my life

Omni Sight Seeing - I see this 1989 album as sort of a capper to all his 80's stuff, something that attempts to fit everything he'd done in the last few years into a single studio album. It's really incredible, easily one of his very best...unfortunately it's kind of the last real great Hosono solo LP. When I went through his entire catalogue this one stuck out as being the only Hosono album was wasn't really based on a particular theme. Unless you consider astral projection a theme.

The Techno 90's - somewhat based off "Laugh-Gas" from Omni Sight Seeing, Hosono did a handful of electronica records in the 90s, sorta similar to his Monad period. he's using more modern equipment and basing a lot of his stuff off Detroit techno & The Orb, so as a result these records don't quite sound as unique. Medicine Comp & Good Sport are both pretty good, NDE I like but it's missing a layer of melody. There's also an album he did with Bill Laswell which I don't remember much about

Various 90's collabs - including Swing Slow & the criminally unknown Love, Peace, & Trance album, which actually does justice to the cosmic meditative New Age genre that was weirdly popular then. both those albums are better than his actual solo LPs from this time.

Reconnecting with old friends - you could also count Swing Slow here, plus the 2000 Tin Pan album (which is pretty cool, it's half a 'new album' by Tin Pan Alley, half fleshing out old demos). the big thing here is Sketch Show/HASYMO, a partial YMO reunion with Takahashi. I like both those albums. Loophole in particular is special, though I suspect Takahashi was responsible for most of it. That Flying Saucer 1947 album probably fits in here too. His solo career is kind of defunct by this point, it wasn't until 2010 that he recorded under his own name again.

The folk covers of very old pop songs phase - from 2011 until now, I guess. Never connected a whole lot with this stuff even though it's quite pleasant. That said, Vu Ja De is very much worth seeking out, particularly the odds n ends on disc 2. Apparently the Fukushima disaster made him too depressed to record new music, so I see this stuff as being therapeutic in a sense. Of course by this point he's earned the right to do whatever he wants.

! :)

i still haven't given omni sight seeing a listen. at this point i'm kind of saving it for a rainy day because i expect i'll like it quite a bit.

the Swing Slow album is great. it's a little uneven but has a few great songs.

Cochin Moon is my favorite, though. i've been listening to quite a bit of earlier Kraftwerk in the wake of Florian's death, and there are a lot of similarities between Cochin Moon and Kraftwerk's early 70s music, especially on Hepatitis and Hum Ghar Sajan. there's a lovely warm playfulness that pulses through all of it, i love it

at the risk of sounding like a total snob I have the vinyl reissue (which is actually fairly cheap, considering) - that plus some big tower speakers and a little grass is the way to hear it

you mean for cochin moon? yeah, i'm keeping my eyes peeled for a reasonably priced copy to show up sometime, but in the meantime it sounds good on headphones and spotify, plus 420 forever obviously.

https://lightintheattic.net/artists/2475-haruomi-hosono

LP is now $18. which is very cheap for Hosono. I haven't been able to get anything else for under $40, outside of Hosono House which I'm not too interested in. there's a very cool 'making of' story in the sleeve.

whoa nice, thanks for the head's up! i will probably pick up Cochin Moon right now then. and yeah, hosono house is also down to $18 but it's not one of my faves

speaking as a techno loving degenerate the medicine comp is my favorite release of his. I don’t think the straighter beats and structures necessarily make it less unique, it’s still very much Hosono. it hits a propulsive hypnotic vibe that resonates with me a bit more than the rest of his catalog, much of which I also really enjoy (NDE is similarly propulsive and also amazing but does indeed focus more squarely on drums)