Yellow Magic Orchestra - Technodelic
#543
November 21 1981
Yellow Magic Orchestra
Technodelic
Genre: See review
2 out of 5
This is techno-electric music for people who love The Beatles but really hate music.
I kid, I kid.
No, it’s awful.
I get it. I see what they are doing.
YMO is off the list. This isn’t rock. This is aggressively ambient rave music waiting for people to start taking Mollie.
I never need to hear another Yellow Magic Orchestra album again. And if anyone tries to convince me that I have to I will pull the plug on The Listening Post forever.
I will never be high enough to like this annoyance.
https://music.apple.com/us/album/technodelic/1291841190
Rebuttal by Stephen Lam
Yellow Magic Orchestra
Technodelic
Genre: Swimming in a Pool of 12-bit Samplers
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Highlights: Seoul Music, Light in Darkness, Key
——
I thought it was odd that, as a YMO fan, I don’t remember much of "Technodelic".
Halfway through the first song (as part of a proper spin of the record to write about it), I thought “Why does this sound so … weird?” My mind kept flashing back to the Electronic Music Studio at SFSU, where I spent countless hours making Buchla/Serge patches, hanging tape loops, and wrestling with the DX7, the Oberheim Expander, and the Emax II sampler.
Then it dawned on me. It was the feeling when I heard the Emu Emax sampler for the first time.
Let me explain.
The Emu Emax and Emax II where early “affordable” digital samplers (“affordable” being a relative term - the Emax had an introductory price of $4K and up). Like many first-generation digital samplers, the resolution was crude. The Emax sampled at 12-bit mono (CD-quality audio is 16-bit stereo, most modern samplers sample at 24-bit) and stored the samples as 8-bit files. The Emax II sampled at 16-bit, but to conserve storage memory (on floppies), many users stayed at the 12-bit resolution. I remember having a few conversations about the “edginess” of 12-bit samples with fellow producers/musicians back in the early 90s. There’s something about the lower resolution that made them sound rough. Yes, these 12-bit sounds cut through mixes like hot knife to butter, but not necessarily in a good way.
Why do I bring this up? The entire first song, and subsequently many other songs on this record, sounded like they were made entirely with 12-bit samples. There’s simultaneously an unpleasant edginess and a hollowness to the sounds. A quick Wikipedia search confirmed my suspicion: most of "Technodelic" was made with an LMD-649 sampler at 12-bit resolution. Moreover, due to the limitations of on-board RAM, most of these samples tend to be short.
Now, anyone who’s lived through the period of early samplers can tell you that the application of the then-novel technology came with some interesting aesthetics. There were two popular schools: faking real instruments (“look ma, I can play sax on a keyboard”) and using non-musical sounds in a musical context (“look ma, I can play dog barks in a song”). The latter of these two were basically all over "Technodelic": almost every song contained samples of atonal and/or non-musical sounds set in a relatively more musical context. With short, atonal/non-musical samples come the idea of looping: It’s conceivably less silly to “play” a pitched dog bark sample than using the same dog bark sample in a rhythmic sense. This means creating looping, repetitive rhythms using short, often atonal/non-musical samples. This also resulted in the music sounding relatively “experimental” - with sampled “Musique Concrété” sounds mixed in with more traditional musical elements.
There’s another prominent electronic group that did something very similar - Kraftwerk.
In essence, "Technodelic" was YMO’s “Electric Café” - when Kraftwerk went both digital and 12-bit sampling for the first time at the same time. Arguably, both records have that harsh, hollow, repetitive, low-res-early-digital sound. (OK, Kraftwerk fans, be gentle with me.)
Coming from the ultra-high-sheen pop paradise of “Solid State Survivor” and “BGM”, where every note was harmonized and candy-baked into perfection (IMO “Solid State Survivor” was one of the best Synth-Pop records ever made), "Technodelic" was a drastic change. Gone was the brilliant, unapologetically all-out analog ear-candy of their first few records. YMO’s secret weapon - Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Neo-Debussy harmonies - went into cold storage. “Songwriting” took a back seat to relatively minimal sample-based rhythmic loops.
This is precisely why my highlight songs on the record were all ones that featured analog synthesizers and murkier sounds among beds of digital samples. “Seoul Music” had a funky beat, a warm midrange-y Prophet 5 patch, and a very cool Shamisen part. “Light In Darkness” featured a fat analog pad and murky, non-digital sounds. “Key” even had melodic hooks and question-answer vocal melodies, which was almost Beatles-esque.
Otherwise worth noting - the rhythmic vocal “cha” samples in “Neue Tanz” was later used in the title track of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s solo album “Neo Geo”, and was explained as Sakamoto’s version of the Balinese Monkey Chant. “Neo Geo” also featured a near-identical drum beat to “Seoul Music”. Also worth noting: after “Technodelic”, YMO went back to a more melodic, harmonized, song-based approach (while still using the new sampling technology) on “Naughty Boys”.
“Technodelic”, to me, was a transitional record. It was their reaction to the digital revolution in sampling and production. Is “Technodelic” crap? Well, is “Electric Café” crap? If Kraftwerk was allowed to make “Electric Café”, why wasn’t YMO allowed to make “Technodelic”?
In all honesty, this was not my favorite YMO record. It ain’t “Solid State Survivor” or “BGM” but, in hindsight, it was an important transitional record for YMO, and the boys have made use of sampling technology in their subsequent solo careers in far more sophisticated ways (in as early as 1985, on Sakamoto’s experimental dance score “Esperanto”). In the old days, when record companies were more interested in nurturing artists, a transitional album like “Technodelic” was allowed to be released, perhaps as a general effort to showcase how artists could grow in time. In 2021, this record might have gone straight to trash.
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