RFI: Yellow Magic Orchestra

the giddiest thing on the planet

this is how i feel about "firecracker"... it's so exuberant.

Do you know about me?
My name is

https://i.imgur.com/5qZLFJ2.jpg

someone unearthed a 1978 performance of YMO, to my knowledge the earliest available live performance by them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiRdITBKRv8

has covers of "Come On" and "Satisfaction" (!!!) plus "Mad Pierrot" which they never did live after this

finally someone made this gif

https://i.imgur.com/MWs0bBf.mp4

'Kyun!'

Friday mood

https://i.imgur.com/YEalIZK.mp4

https://i.imgur.com/gKNfvFv.jpg

i'm sure this one has been here sometime before...

https://i.redd.it/y8j84eep98541.jpg

so fkn cool, love all those people (yes, sting too)

everyone looking so dapper in that pic

it'd be funny to see like, a meat puppet in that photo too

inside all of us there are 3 ppl: a police, a orchestra, and a meat puppet

3.5 million views on this...wonder if it's another oddity of the YT algorithm. its such a cool performance, particularly on the part of Watanabe and Hosono (and yes Akiko too) but the real fun is just watching Takahashi play, he makes the drums seem like so much fun

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

also have been altered to the presence of an HD version of the "Kimi Ni Mune Kyun" video which might be the best low-effort music video ever made

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24bRSUeITXc

XP - Whenever I see the footage of them playing in the US or Europe from that era I always wonder who their crowd was at that time. They seemed to be playing decent theatres, was it like your Talking Heads/B52s/Police fans maybe?

from that same greek theater performance, the GOAT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z5sJJgX3GM

amazing how utterly transformed that tune was on BGM

Yeah that Tong Poo performance is constantly in my recommendations, must be another algorithm quirk.

No idea who their US/European audience were! Kraftwerk fans maybe?

At the end of the tong poo video above, the emcee says that the Tubes are up next, so maybe their audience for that show was accidentally seeing the greatest opening band of all time

right, and I think if you listen closely to Public Pressure you can tell that they were the opening act. right after their last song on Side A you can immediately hear the opening of "TVC15" played over the PA, usually the house music doesn't come in that fact for the headliner

either way they did seem to get a lot of press in the Western world, at least until 1980 or so - the debut, the Xoo Multiplies comp, and BGM are all records I've seen in shops here. everything else is much harder to find. there was definitely a fascination with electronic music in general back then, after all this was when Jean-Michel Jarre was selling millions of copies of goofy synth music. There were also a few Japanese artists breaking through, at least in minor ways...Plastics did a tour here and apparently were fairly well-known in NYC, P-Model opened for XTC (at least Partridge claimed they did?)....feel like Xoo Multiplies (the Japanese version) was sort of a reaction to how these bands were being received overseas

I have a recollection of The Plastics doing Copy on some US Punk documentary film? I think they lived in NYC for a while.

*sorry Plastics, no The

Whenever I see the footage of them playing in the US or Europe from that era I always wonder who their crowd was at that time.

"firecracker" was a hit in black communities iirc & a big influence on early hip hop etc.

I have a recollection of The Plastics doing Copy on some US Punk documentary film? I think they lived in NYC for a while.

Yes! Thanks

iirc Grandmaster Flash always had "Firecracker" in his DJ set. and the group *somehow* wound up on Soul Train

These snaps are so great they give me goosebumps -

An homage to the lost days of the Shinkansen dining car~time to relax transiting between cities after a rushed early hotel departure~as hangover gives way to appetite and the option to enjoy a tasty spaghetti meat sauce, Japanese curry or failing the constitution a simple omrice pic.twitter.com/ZTejyQjaj6

— Steve Jansen (@istevejansen) August 15, 2021

cool to hear "tong poo" and "firecracker" soundtrack junya watanabe's ss22 show, the former seems to be a newly arranged version by sakamoto

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0r0kuC5ts

holy shit how did i not know that akiko yano did an album with (the band) japan?

Fun Fact: Kazemachi Roman by Happy End and Technodelic were released 10 years apart. That is the same amount of time from when "Party Rock Anthem" was released to now.

awesome photo, looks like something out of the Beastie Boys Book

https://i.imgur.com/wVBP6Kp.jpg

Sakamoto was a judge on Iron Chef Japan!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR76FyJdCmo

so was akiko yano!

“Of the three dishes for today, I like this one the best. But you know, the relationship between the prawn and the shark fins in this dish, well you know, it’s a little…dissonant.“

- ryuichi sakamoto

With Throbbing Gristle

https://64.media.tumblr.com/eb0f480d76c4e8645eb977a84c1cff2b/af11579342429de0-4d/s1280x1920/458e25075e57fb5ed9d299dbd4903a314f740689.jpg

Woah! Lucky Gen got a YMO shirt too. Maybe they made him a special GPO one?

I wonder if this was backstage after the Hammersmith Odeon gig in 1980

I'd seen a photo of Gen in the YMO shirt before and had always wondered about it.

https://i.discogs.com/uR_oYov9lZowGSCOYNZAOxjazFjtm4_Fz-l8nyYxUbg/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:597/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTIxOTEy/Ni0xMzU3NTU4NDky/LTM5MDMuanBlZw.jpeg

I don't wonder if you could buy them at gigs, perhaps from the merch stall.

I know they packaged those shirts later on with the Ultimate Collection box set.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/UC-YMO-Premium-Ultimate-Collection-of-Yellow-Magic-Orchestra-Limited-T-shirt-/313470319914

i have probably looked at that TG Greatest Hits sleeve 100s of times but somehow never noticed the YMO shirt. x post.

Not really great news

https://www.brooklynvegan.com/ryuichi-sakamoto-battling-stage-4-cancer-report/

Awful news.

When I see a YMO thread bumped, I always have a little fluttery moment where I think that it may be sad news about him or about Yuki, boomer-era Japan is going to go into major mourning when he goes.

actually makes me feel guilty about bumping them all the time. I think the same when these threads get bumped.

I'm a member of a few YMO groups on FB so I kinda knew something wasn't right, but it's hard to tell when everything is translated from Japanese. I thought the "I hope to make music until the end" quote was from Takahashi, who just turned 70. he seemed to be doing okay, though. but he's not performing live at the moment which is a bit troubling. him and YT are such restless musicians that you know something's up when they take some time off.

Don't Panic!

I just thought I'd share this w/you all.

"A recording of YMO's first-ever show together, from shortly after they released their first album. You will notice that it does not contain any of Ryuichi Sakamoto's solo stuff (from 1000 Knives) like the other concerts from '78 do. To make things even more unusual, Makoto Yano (Akiko's first husband) plays keyboards here. Furthermore, this is the only recording I know of that contains live versions of 'Simoon' and 'Mad Pierrot'."

https://fromsmash.com/WW4oHf0fSv-bt

It's really great, btw

oh wow, never heard a boot that early. "Simoon" is uh...pretty woozy. interesting that they had "Behind the Mask" worked out already.

Me too, the earliest one I'd heard was from the Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo, a couple of months later with its lovely disco fantasia version of Tong Poo and Sakamoto's keys distorting throughout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ55qxrzh4w

Hosono turns 75 today!!

Let's just dwell for one moment on how epic Harry is, I mean, he's bloody legendary.

I had a very strange YMO related dream the other day

I was a member of a Facebook group called "YMO Tongposting" (or something like that) which was mostly memes about "Yukihiro Takahashi's Sexual Voice Message" and I came up with an idea for a meme that would get a thousand likes, it was a video of the three members of YMO on Wheel of Fortune and every time one of them was up they would say "give me a Q" like in "Cue" and Pat Sajak would keep going "sorry, no Qs" and then eventually "do you have any guesses other than Q?" and the three would say "Q! Q! Q!" like in "Kimi Ni Mune Kyun". I posted it and it got thousands of likes and in the comments a bunch of photos of YT with his arms folded and the text "Yukihiro Takahashi Fact Check: True"

ok I know this shit belongs in a fanboy Discord but I was just impressed I came up with a pretty fully formed (if extremely niche) joke in my dreams. I had to document it somewhere