RIP Yukihiro Takahashi, Electronic Pop Pioneer

[humprof]

I keep learning about all these important figures only after they're gone. Co-founder (with Ryuichi Sakamoto) of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Influential on hip-hop (where they were widely sampled in the 80s and 90s), New Wave, techno, and early video game music.

From Clay Risen's obit in the New York Times:

Mr. Takahashi “was remarkably skilled at taking what were obviously artificial, technologically mediated sounds and using them to build songs that sound fully and organically human,” Michael K. Bourdaghs, a professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Chicago, said in a phone interview.

The band and its tech-inflected sound arrived at just the right time. Japan had long since remade itself as a postwar economic engine, but by the late 1970s it was becoming something else: a global emblem of techno-utopianism and futuristic cool. Sony released the Walkman in 1979, just as Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake were taking over Paris fashion runways with their playful, visionary designs.

 

[4-earredwonder]

Fortunately, SONY Japan has released at least a dozen classic Yellow Magic Orchestra's hybrid Stereo SACDs and one blu ray/sacd combo set.

https://www.hraudio.net/search.php?format=1&keywords=yellow+magic+orchestra
R.I.P. Yukihiro