Of course I remembered even more Moldy 70s songs immediately after I posted my Moldy 70s video collection, but one of them led to an unanticipated discovery.  Looking for Starbuck's "Moonlight Feels Right" on YouTube, I found instead a live performance from 1986 of the same song by Yukihiro Takahashi, the former drummer of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose members (Takahashi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Haruomi Hosono) have a hand in just about every piece of music from Japan that I hear.  It's an impressive arrangement with the synth riffs played by a horn section, and the keyboardist even replicates the what is undoubtedly the best marimba solo ever in a pop song:

yukihiro takahashi 1986 Moonlight feels right

And for comparison purposes, here's the original:

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Item 1: Mrs. Veneer buys Ryuichi Sakamoto's CD of solo piano pieces, BTTB.  It's quite beautiful and Sakamoto mostly avoids the New Age clichés that plague so many piano CDs.  Some of the pieces are obvious homages to classical works, such as "Opus," which evokes the Gymnopédies of Erik Satie:

04 Opus

Ryuichi Sakamoto

♫ Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No.1 [piano] ♫

Item 2: I learn from Wiel's Time Capsule that Mark Stewart is preparing a new album (his first of new material since 1995!) and tour, and that he has a new video out:

05 Stranger

Mark Stewart

Connection 2: I've heard some of those lyrics before: "Somewhere, there is a place for us".  They're from "Somewhere," from West Side Story.  David Sylvian recorded a version of that for a TIAA-CREF commercial:

Somewhere (Orchestral Commercial Version)

David Sylvian

Connection 3: Sylvian and Sakamoto's collaborative song "Forbidden Colours," from the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, is perhaps the best-known song by either of them in the US:

Sylvian & Sakamoto - Forbidden Colours

Connection 4: Hey, Mark Stewart did two versions of "Forbidden Colours" on that very same album!  Here's the dub version:

07 Forbidden Dub

Mark Stewart

It's all connected!

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I rarely remember to search for my old favorites on YouTube, so it often happens that I happen upon them while blog surfing.  That's how I just turned up a couple lip-synching performances by Japan of the first song I ever heard by them, "Ghosts."  Having discovered New Wave and WHFS in 1981, it seemed there was a whole aternate universe of music to catch up on, and the only way to do it was to listen to HFS as much as possible, often long into the night.  It was late at night when I first heard "Ghosts"; I thought it was Bryan Ferry, but the arrangement was way futuristic, unlike anything I'd heard from him before.  I was fascinated with Bryan Ferry at the time (still am); I had always taken singers for granted before then, but his unique vocal style made me pay attention and realize that he was doing something artistic, and by extension, so do all singers.  Looking back on David Sylvian's career I see that his Ferryisms were just one stop in a long stylistic journey, and that he has always had a lot more power in his voice than Ferry.  Likewise, the weird synth burbles of "Ghosts" were the terminal point in Japan's evolution, their sound having started with glam rock and progressed through eurodisco, new romanticism, and dark balladry.  Hearing "Ghosts" again I think it sounds as fresh as ever, with lyrics that have stuck with me over the decades (despite my ignorance of lyrics in general):

Just when I think I'm winning
When I've opened every door
The ghosts of my life grow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life grow wilder than the wind

Here are two choices of video, both to the album track, one from Old Grey Whistle Test, in color with some cheesy effects, the other in black and white from I-don't-know-where, focused almost exclusively on Sylvian.  In both videos he's wearing more makeup than a Maybelline man.

Japan: Ghosts

Japan - Ghosts

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I'll cop right up front to regurgitating a BoingBoing post, but it's just too cool to pass up, and I'm going to include videos right here instead of sending you to YouTube.  The BoingBoing post consisted mainly of a quote from Sweatyfrog.com:

Maywa Denki is an art unit produced by Nobumichi Tosa. It was named after the company that his father used to run bygone days. Its unique style is indicated by a term he uses: for example, each piece of Maywa Denki's work is called "a product" and a live performance or exhibition is held as "a product demonstration." The products produced so far include "NAKI Series," fish-motif nonsense machines, "Tsukuba Series," original musical instruments, and "Edelweiss," flower-motif objet d'art. Although Maywa Denki is known and appreciated as an artist, its promotion strategies are full of variety: exhibition, live stages, performances, producing music, videos, writing, merchandising toys, stationery, and electric devices.

Here, then, is a clip from a Tsukuba Series product demonstration:

What neither BoingBoing nor Sweatyfrog mention is that Maywa Denki are coming to the US!  They will be performing in Washington at the Kennedy Center in February 2008, according to their website.

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My grasp of deep funk has always been of the "I can't define it, but I know it when I hear it" variety, but now I have come up with a working definition: deep funk is funk that pretends P-Funk never happened.  How's that?  Japan's Osaka Monaurail (named after James Brown's "(It's Not the Express) It's the J.B.'s Monaurail") are deep funk veterans by now, having formed in 1992 "to play the late 60's - early 70's funkies," so they're quite good at it by now.  Here's a track from their 2004 album, Thankful:

09 mind power (pts 1 & 2)

Osaka Monaurail

That song has a similar feel to "Ooh Baby" by Defunkt (from my very first entry on this blog): similar beat, similar structure, and similar dynamics.  Here's "Ooh Baby" again:

Defunkt - Ooh Baby

Defunkt

Not entirely dissimilar?  There's a concise interview with Osaka Monaurail leader Ryo Nakata on the Metropolis website; he's been into the deep funk revival since it began in the 80s.  He also proves to be very insightul about the life and music of James Brown.  But more importantly, he's a dynamic performer:

Osaka Monaurail in SunSetLive 2005

And finally, no responsible band would be without a MySpace page.

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