#3737 Yellow Magic Orchestra - Public Pressure

3/5 YMO's stilted bleeps make the transition to the live setting surprisingly well! The vocals give it the songs some urgency, and the live synth parts have little imperfections that bring human excitement to the lockstep grooves. It sounds downright danceable, cool, even?

#3736 Yellow Magic Orchestra - Yellow Magic Orchestra (US)

2.5/5 very clever at the time, making those melodies out of such basic electronics, with those plinky exotica flourishes. But I can't remotely recommend you bother with these baubles in 2020 except out of historical curiosity

#3735 Ryuichi Sakamoto - Thousand Knives

3/5 ahead of its time, deeply quirky, dipping into sparse soundscapes and roughshod electronic beats and understated loungey piano. But this hasn't aged especially well, sounding quaint, arch, almost weird for its own sake by now

#3630 Harenemuri - Harutosyura

3.5/5 packed with frantic energy: frayed post-punk guitars vs. laptop electronics vs. tacky pop-metal vs. pure idol choruses, shot through with endless clipped rap-singing. More annoying // more pleasant than it sounds; disorienting - anxious - joyful

#3576 Somei Satoh - Mandara Trilogy

3/5 drones as patient as time, the soundtrack to the ending all things, disinterested in being listened to

#3498 Kuniyuki Takahashi - Feather World

4/5 an album united by patience, repetition, groove, and otherwise unbeholden. Interflows of space disco, jazz, ambient electronic, polyrhythmic getdown, accoustic folk

#3496 Yasuaki Shimizu - IQ 179

4/5 see! This is why albums matter! There's songs on here so packed with enough crooning, saxes, and guitars that you'd call it as schlock. But the rest is so weird, alternately chopped to pieces, spare and breathful, repetitively nightmarish, endlessly neon, until it all melts into a pop-art experimental synthwave prophecy. I'm not sure I even like any of the weird songs on their own (title track in particular is a dud), but the combined effect is so hypnotic and strange that it's an enthralling listen.

#3495 Susumu Yokota - Symbol

4/5 we sample so many things, but not classical, not like this. girl talk for the erudite-adjacent, these little flickers of familiarity, looped and crossed across. overly intellectual and yet. right novel this, lush, pulling across time, soft and seductive

#3491 Terumasa Hino - Kimiko

2.5/5 man i know nothing about jazz, and dudes can play, but it all feels a bit showy and solo-forward without any real chemistry or transcendence

#3489 Mariah - Utakata No Hibi

4/5 a slippery beastie. a part repeating, but that part might be rather strange. a hitched beat you're not too comfortable with, but that it worms its way in with repetition, and then a sea of horns and adornments and variations. sounding very live, with a backbone of machine intention. method of creation very unclear, intriguing. as intimate and detached and disorienting as its cover art. man, japan in the 80s.

#3486 Susumu Yokota - Sakura

4/5
god that second track, predicting tycho's wanderous grace by a decade. Followed by endless experiments in texture, repetition, progression. a hard recommend for anyone interested in interesting ambient angles. I dont remember how I came across this list but its on point

#3485 Yasuaki Shimizu - Kakashi

4.5/5
The creativity is staggering. Pop ditties, Broken Social washes, repetitive experiments, melting sunrise proto-synthwave. A confabulation of traditional Japanese sounds and burgeoning electronics from '82 that we're just now catching up to. The best weird thing I've come across in years

#3469 Haruomi Hosono - Hosono House

4/5 weightless japanese Americana, with the creak of a chair just out of sight, wrapped in the pull of nylon. sweet and clear, with a spike of dr john swagger. doubly recommended for anyone looking for something unexpected

#3468 Woob - New Program

4/5 after work i wandered to the docks outside the aquarium and watched the planes land, boats in the foreground, and track 8 played and was the perfect slow motion soundtrack. and elsewhere it builts, slowly, with great earning, towards something a bit more beatsome, but this is the sound of patience, of the earth hardening, of planets drifting from orbits

#3424 Go Yama, Axion117 - Vintage Soul

2.5/5 whatever Axion117 brought to the table, it messed up Go Yama's groove, dragging it into detuned sludgy bad-synthwave territory, abandoning the tunesome backbone

#3421 Go Yama - Glo Fish

3.5/5 Go Yama's sprightly Squarepusher stutter-squiggles elevated by bold swerves of guitar noodling, bringing unpredictable, narrative flow to loop lockdowns. Musical, clever, pleasant, inventive

#3414 fusq - Polarity

3.5/5 a delightful smear of buzzy synths and upended vocals, every possible knob turned 30 degrees from reality. Thoug h all that creativity's unde rcut by the big thump-thump-thump-thump crutch

#3397 Toshiyuki Terui - What I Think About the World

2.5/5 Wandering guitar lines that sound like instrumental versions of existing songs, or otherwise like something's missing. Could be handy if you're making a movie that needs background music for 11 different sunrise scenes

#3384 Kikagaku Moyo - Mammatus Cloud

3/5
Pure Eastern psychedalics, all drones and tones and the barest tickle of guitar - too aimless for me, lacking their later visceralia. The main reason to stop by is the endless quasi-cover of Tomorrow Never Knows, distilled down to its barest ghost

#3367 Chai - Punk

4/5
What sounds at first like candycoated gimmickry reveals plenty of complexity. Subtly dense, insidiously hooky, lyrics laced with pretty poison, every maximalist blast backed by a salvo of fizzy cluster missiles