A short entry here, mainly as lately I haven’t really had time to write in this thing and probably will struggle to do so over the coming weeks. Summer is generally a busy time, if not with design work (which is oddly a busy time of the year for me) but also various musical projects and of course trying to get out and take advantage of the long daylight periods of the Scottish summer. There’s a large backlog of half-written entries for this which I hope to finish up and get up and published soon enough.
I thought I’d pop in and give a bit of appreciation for this track by Japanese vocalist Junko Ohashi, who had a long run of releasing music over fifty years, starting with the 1974 release Feeling Now on the Phillips label. Now, I can’t say I’m remotely familiar with the majority of her vast catalogue of music, but the odd song here and there I’ve heard I’ve really gotten into. Alternating between both English and Japanese lyrics throughout her archive of recorded material, I suppose due to the country and culture where Ohashi comes from her music at times could be filed into such Japanese genres as city pop and J-Pop, but more broadly a lot of her music — especially from the late 1970s into the 1980s — could be filed under disco, funk, electronic ballads and at times even electro-funk, Such is the case with the track “Dancin'”, which might be her most well-known songs to a broader, world-wide listening public mining out gold from the disco and dance vaults of that general period.
Released on the 1984 album Magical, “Dancin'” features some great synthesizer sounds, starting off from the ominous low-end saw-wave synth that brings in the track, followed by bouncy bass lines and percussive, funky synth stabs. When listening to “Dancin'” I’m always fascinated by the chorus and how the notes of the bass line there interact with the chord progressions in the chorus. It’s interesting, off the “beaten path” and shows there’s some good musicianship at work.
With some Japanese artists working in this style I start to connect parallels with American artists working in the electro-funk genre such as The System, covered here previously. There’s a mix on this site you can check out of choice cuts from that genre that I’m into.
I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of music in this style from that time that has had new life breathed into it — albeit in a rather processed way — by way of internet genres such as vaporwave, which often feature such city pop tracks in many mixes of the vaporwave genre that can be found through any given number of internet curators, such as the prolific Jason Sanders. Often the original tracks are pitched down and slowed in speed with any given number of VST plugin effects like reverb, filter sweeps or more novelty flange and phaser effects. Even the official promo video of another track from Magical titled “Telephone Number” consists of colours and visuals that again could easily slide into the established visual aesthetic of vaporwave, especially the mallsoft musical sub-genre.
Having discovered the track on various mixes over the years before investigating Ohashi’s music further, I suppose I was brought back recently for a re-listen for two reasons. First, as mentioned, the musicianship and songwriting on this track is pretty top notch, regardless of whether it’s a genre you as a reader are into or not. As Ohashi and her collaborators have released music over the decades responding to moving styles and trends, what underpins the majority of her output is just good songwriting. Some genres emphasize that art more than others.
I was having a conversation with a friend about the thinning musicality of a lot of the current ‘dark scene’ acts, in where although a lot of the tracks are produced well and are indeed danceable, they seem to lack a lot movement of notes and chords/keys, as well as variations in rhythm and qualities that make them unique. Of course there’s some really great songwriters here and there that work in this general style, which encompasses everything from minimal wave, goth rock, post punk, EBM and so on, I seem to recall myself saying in one of these conversations something to the effect of, “Well, I don’t hear a lot of newer, dark synth acts in the scene where I’m like, ‘Wow, they’re great songwriters.'”.
Offhand this probably comes off like a stereotypical old man ‘walking 30 miles in the snow back in the day’ mentality, but I honestly can’t help making what I feel is a genuine observation. Where a lot of musicians creating tracks in the more electronic side of this ‘dark scene’ may view themselves as music producers, I tend to think of myself more as a songwriter, and the genres I like to work in are common between the aforementioned.
Secondly — on a completed unrelated other tangent — I decided last night to fire up my mini astronaut projector in the bedroom while going to sleep, with sparkling lights and images of morphing plasma dancing about the ceiling above me. Like some cosmic co-incidence “Dancin'” came on the stereo and it absolutely fit the moment.
Sadly Ohashi passed away a couple of years ago at the age of 73. I imagine she probably holds some sort of status as a national treasure in her native Japan. And Magical itself is packaged in a strange and post-humously onimous cover, with New York’s World Trade Centre gleaming in the burning hues of the setting sun in the west, unaware of the events that would transpire almost twenty years later.