Tonight’s album is one of the most mysterious that I’ve ever shared.
Synthesizer ga Kanaderu Nihon no Meika (complete album download)
Hell of a cover, right? A lot going on there, typeface wise. It was even a struggle for me to figure out the proper title of it at first. But I think my boyfriend and I figured it out. Best we can figure, the name of this record is シンセサイザーが奏でる日本の名歌. That’s pronounced as “Synthesizer ga Kanaderu Nihon no Meika” and translates to “The Greatest Japanese Songs on Synthesizer.”
For the makers of this album (more on them in a bit) “greatest Japanese songs” meant “popular ballads and folk music, mostly from the 1960s.” A lot of the songs here were originally enka tunes. Enka is a bit hard to describe, there really isn’t an analog to it in Western culture. Basically it’s music for your grandparents, sentimental slow-moving ballads without a hint of that newfangled rock and roll the kids go on about. Imagine if someone combined easy listening, folk music, and American standards into one genre, that would be enka. It’s Barry Manilow meets Celine Deon with a hint of Perry Cuomo
I’m not going to be as bold as to say that its uniformly bad, but it’s not for me. I am not that music’s target market. I will refrain from critical comment. I must also refrain as to the accuracy of these interpretations. Maybe they’re as faithful as all-synthesizers cover can be. Maybe they’re radical re-workings that remake the songs entirely (I doubt that). I just don’t know.
Judging them solely on their synthesized versions though, they’re not bad. There are some good melodies here. I dig “One Rainy Night In Tokyo” quite a bit, it has a good groove. “Una Sera Di Tokyo” isn’t half bad either, with a playful yet melancholy sound. The person behind this album sure knew what they were doing when they put it together. All of the songs, even the ones where I can tell the source material ain’t all that, sound good. Excellent choices regarding audio effects and production all around.
So who the hell did this?
The credited artist on the cover is “Beautiful Shateau & Synthesizer.” I assume they meant “Chateau” but that’s what happens when you rely on katakana pronunciation to spell something. Trust me, I know. This is an English teacher in Japan you’re talking to.
A quick web search on them brings up next to nothing. There’s one incredibly crackly YouTube video of a single track from this album, a Discogs page, and the occasional online auction listing. All are pretty sparse in terms of information.
Even their discogs page is a mess. It didn’t even have this album on it (I added it last week). However, the pages for the two albums it did have credit Hideki Matsutake as a “synthesizer conductor.” That didn’t surprise me one bit. I actually suspected these records were of his creation the moment I first listened to them.
I’ve mentioned Matsutake here a few times in the past. He played some synthesizers and sequencers on some of YMO’s albums, and he also released plenty of music as a solo artist under the name Logic System. I think he’s a genius and one of the greatest electronic musicians of all time.
I met him once.
I’m a fan.
He’d be the Wendy Carlos of Japan if Tomita wasn’t already the Wendy Carlos of Japan. He is an incredibly early pioneer of electronic music and deserves far more recognition than he has. Dude is epic. Check out anything he put out, or was even associated with, from the early-70s to mid-80s and just prepare to have your mind blown. He was leap years ahead of his time with the kind of stuff he was pulling off with even the most basic tools.
I imagine that this record, and the others that he put out as “Beautiful Shateau & Synthesizer” have to be some of of his earliest releases. They’re definitely pre-YMO, with their ultra-minimal, definitely monophonic synthesizer sound. However, I can’t confirm this100% because, and here’s the crazy thing, none of the “Shateau” records have any kind of copyright or release date information on them at all. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. And if you know anything about Japanese albums, that’s pretty odd. Many of them label their release date down to the day. For these records to not even have a basic copyright date is just bizarre. And I know it’s not just my copies missing this information. Everywhere I look, whenever I can turn up anything about these albums, the year is always blank or listed as “unknown.”
They’re records outside of time. Creepy.
This one certainly falls under the “not for everyone” camp, and I know this. I’m not going to complain if you don’t like this (but don’t be a dick and comment about how much you don’t like it, okay?) but I thought that this had to be shared for a few reasons. First of all, it’s probably one of, if not the, earliest release by a true innovator of electronic music. If for nothing else, this deserves to be archived and shared for that alone. Additionally, while I’m an alien to the source material, I still find the versions on this album entertaining and worth a listen. The soothing melodies combined with the harsh synthesizer tunes make it sound like easy listening music from another planet or something. It’s groovy stuff. Beck would sample this shit if he knew about it.
Unfortunately, whoever owned this album before me really fucking loved it and played the shit out of it. Or they hated it and used it as sandpaper. Either way, it’s banged up pretty bad. I did my best to give a good digital polish with scratch and noise removal software, but there’s only so much I can do with an all-synthesizer record like this. The software that removes cracks, crackles and whatnot often picks up the harsh, peaking sounds of an early synthesizer as noise, and tries to remove them too. I’ve done my best to clean this up, but it’s a bit more scratchy than my usual rips and for that I apologize. I do plan on sharing more of the “Shateau” albums in the future, and while the other ones don’t sound great, they all sound better than this one.
Hope you don’t mind the scratches too much, and hope you enjoy some ultra-rare ultra-early ultra-awesome electronic music by an ultra-legend of the industry.
Happy Halloween, Here are More Incredibly Strange Japanese Covers of Western Pop Music
Monday, October 31st, 2016I hope you all had a happy Halloween weekend. I spent mine hobbled with a back injury. But don’t fret, it was not all tragedy. My boyfriend made me homemade salsa and taco salad while we watched Empire Of The Ants, the 1977 horror schlock featuring Joan Collins getting terrorized by an army of giant ants.
Also, I had prescription painkillers, so that was nice.
Ikkaku Tanabe
究極の選択 (Ultimate Decision)This is a Japanese electro cover of Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein.” But wait, it’s even weirder than it sounds.
The song is made up almost entirely of samples and other digital effects. Vocals are repeated and pitch-shifted to create melodies, while the bassline of “Frankenstein” plays behind them. Other random samples are thrown in too. I swear at about one minute and twenty-eight seconds in it samples a fraction of a second of vocals from “Heaven Is A Place On Earth.” Tell me I’m wrong I dare you.
The bizarre musical nature of the song was enough to make me fall in love with it, but I had to know if the all-Japanese lyrics were equally as batshit as the music it accompanies. Thankfully, my lovely boyfriend (who I love) went through the hassle of translating the lyrics.
And it turns out the song is as balls out crazy as it sounds. The lyrics are a continuous series of hypothetical no-win choices, many of which vulgar or disgusting in nature, hence the name “Ultimate Choice.” Read the translated lyrics below and see just what kind of decisions you’re being forced to make.
Yup.
So who is Ikkaku Tanabe, AKA the Holy Great Ultimate Decision God?
Judging from this track, you might think he was some crazy performance artist or avant-garde musician. But actually he was a Japanese kodan performer. Kodan is a very traditional form of Japanese storytelling that dates back to the 1300s. While humor is a part of kodan, it is not stand-up comedy, which makes this, his sole foray into music, all the more bizarre.
I guess after all those years of talking about historical battles and samurais, the dude had a lot of shit humor built up in him.
Logic System
Classical GasLogic System is Hideki Matsutake, who worked on many of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s albums as a programmer. I really recommend his first two solo albums, Venus and Logic, they’re some of the best electronic music the early 80s had to offer. I also suggest you track down his 1979 album Digital Moon, which is entirely electronic covers of James Bond themes and it might be the greatest thing ever made.
Coming in a close second is this cover of “Classical Gas,” the 1968 instrumental by Mason Williams that you no doubt know even if you don’t know the name of it. Instead of going giving it a rather faithful electronic re-imagining, Matsutake starts out rather conventional and then goes off the fucking rails for an technopop explosion of synthesized keyboard and bass the likes of which you’ve never heard. This is so crazy it should’ve been the theme to a Darius boss battle.
The No Comments
Somebody To LoveIf you ever wanted to hear a cover of “Somebody to Love” that sounds like it’s being sung by the bastard child of Nina Hagen and Kate Bush in a yodeling competition, then yo check it.
I don’t know much about this group, sadly. They released three albums in Japan only in the early 80s and then vanished. I don’t even think their albums were even given a CD re-issue. They’re weird. Kind of funky I guess, but really more early new wave, like a polished X-Ray Spex or a rougher version of The Police.
Like I said, weird. If I can find more of their stuff or find out more about them I might share more later.
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