Yellow Magic Orchestra (album) - Production

Production

The album was intended to be a one-off project for producer and bass player Haruomi Hosono and the two session musicians he had hired: drummer Yukihiro Takahashi and keyboard player Ryuichi Sakamoto. The trio were to create their own cover version of Martin Denny's 1959 exotica melody "Firecracker" with modern electronics, as a subversion of the exoticisation and Orientalism of the original tune, along with various original compositions also exploring themes of Asianness, exoticisation and Orientalism from a Japanese perspective. The album would eventually be called Yellow Magic Orchestra, as a satire of Japan's obsession with black magic at the time. The project proved highly popular, culminating in a career for the three musicians; one that would last until 1983, before successful solo careers and reunions over the decades to come.

They began recording the album in July 1978 at a Shibaura studio in Tokyo. It utilized a wide variety of electronic music equipment, including the Korg PS-3100 polyphonic synthesizer, the Moog III-C and Minimoog monosynths, the Polymoog and ARP Odyssey analog synthesizers, the Oberheim Eight-Voice synthesizer, the Fender Rhodes electric piano, the Korg VC-10 vocoder, the electronic drum kits Yamaha Drums and Syn-Drums, and the Fender Jazz Bass. It was also the earliest known popular music album to use the Roland MC-8 Microcomposer, which was programmed by Hideki Matsutake during recording sessions. Roland called the MC-8 a "computer music composer" and it was the first stand-alone microprocessor-based music sequencer. It also introduced features such as a keypad to enter note information and 16 kilobytes of random access memory which allowed a maximum sequence length of 5200 notes, a huge step forward from the 8-16 step sequencers of the era. At the time, Billboard noted that the use of such computer-based technology in conjunction with synthesizers allowed Yellow Magic Orchestra to create new sounds that were not possible until then. The band later described both the MC-8 and its programmer Hideki Matsutake as an "inevitable factor" in both their music production and live performances. Besides the electronic equipment, the only acoustic instruments used in the album were a Steinway piano and marimba percussion instrument.

The album was an early example of synthpop, a genre that Yellow Magic Orchestra helped pioneer. It was also an early example of a computer-themed album, predating Kraftwerk's Computer World (1981) by several years. Yellow Magic Orchestra experiments with different styles of electronic music, such as Asian melodies played over synthpop backings in "Firecracker" and "Cosmic Surfin", the extensive use of video game sounds in "Computer Game", and the electronic disco bass in "Tong Poo", a song that was inspired by Chinese music produced during the China's Cultural Revolution, and in turn influenced video game music such as Tetris. Both "Computer Game" tracks proper contain the same audio and were made to sound as if both games were being played in the same room; each track being from the perspective of its titular arcade game unit: Circus and Space Invaders. The song also samples the opening chiptune used in the arcade game Gun Fight (1975). Both Circus and Space Invaders, along with several other popular arcade video games, were also featured in the promotional film for "Tong Poo".

The titles for several songs on the B-side are based on Jean-Luc Godard film names. “Tong Poo” is the Cantonese title for Le Vent d'est. “La Femme Chinoise” is La Chinoise with “femme” (the French word for “woman”) added after the feminine definite article “la.” Finally, “Mad Pierrot” is an English translation of 気狂いピエロ (Kichigai Piero?), the title under which Pierrot le fou was released in Japan.