Source : the age
In the studio of the 79-year-old Japanese pop icon Haruomi Hosono is a bust of Ludwig van Beethoven, some flowers and a small bowl of water. He pulled the bust out of storage when it came time to record the track Figlio Perduto for his new album Yours Sincerely, his first collection of new music in seven years.
Hosono’s 23rd studio album features gently soothing electronics and acoustic guitar that feels whimsically reflective, like he’s reaching for his inner child late in life. “Maybe because of my age I might have gone back to being a child. I do have quite a lot of those memories from my childhood,” says Hosono, contemplating the idea.
“Rather than being stories of the past, they are still continuing even now. For example, Beethoven has been glaring at me since I was a child … Now it’s sitting here and I’m praying to it. Until then I had left it alone because I was a bit scared.”
Summing up Hosono’s career is almost impossible. His early work in the band Happy End (1969-1972), then as a solo artist on his debut Hosono House (1973), is frequently cited as a touchstone by indie artists, most notably the similarly prolific Mac DeMarco (the title of Harry Styles’ Grammy-winning album Harry’s House was a homage, too). His later outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra is one of the most influential synth-pop groups of all time.
But if there’s one consistent thread, it can be found on Figlio Perduto, a cover in Japanese of a track by Sarah Brightman that sets an Italian translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem Erlkonig to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
This iterative, memetic layering of cultures, often with technology, has been a through line of Hosono’s entire career. Born in 1947, Hosono grew up in post-WWII Japan, after nuclear devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when US popular culture worked its way off military bases and into Japanese life.
“My mother is no longer with us; it’s been about five or six years now. She really loved Hollywood movies and music, and I was heavily influenced by that. From a young age she would play movie soundtracks for me. Her idol was Fred Astaire. I watched those movies a lot as I grew older. My father probably liked it, too; he even said he wanted to be a dancer because of my mother’s influence. That’s the kind of person my mother was. I’m very grateful,” says Hosono.
Happy End was a Japanese approximation of American roots rock. Next, as a solo artist, Hosono began a reflexive reappropriation of 1950s exotica records on his albums Tropical Dandy, Bon Voyage co. and Paraiso, the album on which he first worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. The three men became Yellow Magic Orchestra, Japan’s most influential band, whose first major hit in 1978 was a subversive synth-pop cover reclaiming the “oriental” melody of the 1959 exotica recording Firecracker by Martin Denny.
Hosono pioneered the use of electronic instruments with his YMO bandmates – each hugely influential solo musicians, producers, session musicians and composers in their own right – and Japanese popular music became increasingly dominated by electronic compositions in the wake of YMO’s peak 1970s and 1980s popularity. Some middle-aged Japanese businessmen still sport the group’s “techno cut” undercut hairstyle.
The first record Hosono bought as a boy was a version of Mon Oncle by the Japanese singer Jun Nakajima, taken from Jacques Tati’s film of the same name. The film is a comedic account of one man’s struggle at confronting modernity and technology – a prophetic first purchase for a pioneering technologist with his own questions about today’s technological advancements.
“For Jacques Tati I think there was some irony in how things would break down, but now we have entered an era where it is no longer a carefree matter. After all, with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, moving into the 20th century from the age of oil, machines began to work so that human workers didn’t have to use their muscles,” says Hosono.
“But now we’ve stopped using our heads, too. We don’t use our brain muscles because AI does it for us. What will happen to us before long? It is an era filled with anxiety that our heads might become completely empty.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Yours Sincerely finds Hosono turning to matters of the soul and the natural world. Rojiura (Walking Vibration) is a new version of a track originally recorded for the 2006 television drama Walkers, about a group of adults undertaking Ohenro – the 88-temple, esoteric Buddhist pilgrimage around Shikoku island. (This elicits his wide-eyed approval when I share that I completed Ohenro in 2023, with YMO records stuffed in my backpack, and he asks me to listen to Rojiura if I ever walk the trail again.)
Hosono attended an Anglican school but has been interested in Buddhism since reading the popular Chinese story Journey to the West as a boy. “I’ve always loved stories about various gods,” he says.
Yours Sincerely’s guiding principle is laid out on its opening track, Note of Mothership – a gently bubbling acknowledgment of the maternal force Hosono believes envelopes the planet. It’s a concept informed in part by an ongoing interest in the British chemist James Lovelock, who, along with the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, developed the Gaia theory in the 1970s. The theory posited that Earth is a self-regulating superorganism composed of both living organisms and their inorganic surroundings.
“Within [the Gaia hypothesis] there is an idea called ‘Daisyworld’. Daisies of various colours bloom on Earth. Why are there so many colours? If it were just a single colour, light would concentrate and the climate wouldn’t be right, which is why they are so diverse,” says Hosono. “Ever since then I’ve always loved that [maternal] world-view.”
Yours Sincerely is one of those late-career marvels in which all of an artist’s genre experiments and sonic excursions coalesce into a perfect jewel, no longer scattered across albums but contained here as a snapshot of their life and art. Still, even the most influential musicians get cold feet about their creations.
“When I made it I liked it myself but I was anxious about what other people would think,” says Hosono. “However, now, I feel it’s fine, and that everyone will probably like it, too.”
Haruomi Hosono’s Yours Sincerely is out now.
