I could go on and on about the title track, but each of the album’s six tunes are a revelation, from textural sound design flex “Island Of Woods” to Kraftwerk-acknowledgement “Japanische elektronische Volkslied” and vivid synth funk earworm “ Plastic Bamboo.” The ultra jazzy “Grasshoppers” intertwines a soulful piano performance with bluesy synth bass and a light sprinkling of arp licks, gently foreshadowing his obsession with the piano a little later in his career. The bubblebath syndrums, brooding synth swells, prodiguous guitar solos and burpy reggae bassline all glue together like a robot band that’s been playing together for 1000 years - you are now listening to * das neue Japanische elektronische ish*.
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO THOUSAND KNIVES FULL
After a chilling recital of a poem (written by Chairman Mao) through a vocoder, Ryuichi switches on the full power grid for “ Thousand Knives,” breaking completely unchartered but deliriously funky new ground. To truly appreciate the brilliance of this record, you gotta understand how old it is - Saturday Night Fever had only come out one year prior, and Unknown Pleasures was still one year away… OLD, man! For a Japanese man to think he could pop in America in 1978 with a vocoder-fied exotica romp like this, he may as well have just put on an Armani suit and climbed into the bath with an electric lamp.
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Thousand Knives was recorded in the weird hours of the night, as Sakamoto was preoccupied with his work as an in-demand session musician during the day, and you can hear that weirdness, that relentless search for new sonic worlds straight away. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s landmark debut album, recorded in 1977-78 shortly after co-founding Yellow Magic Orchestra with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi.