Tsugutoshi Goto -- The Night Landing: Yuudoutou（誘導灯）

Well, this is a bit of an auspicious occasion for a Friday night. All these years on the blog, I've had bassist/composer Tsugutoshi Goto（後藤次利）in the background when it came to his category in Labels, but for this article, he is now front and centre.

The reason is that I'm featuring the final track from his 5th solo album "City Trickles ~ Machi no Shizuku"（街の雫）from 1985. This is "The Night Landing: Yuudoutou" (Emergency Exit Light), an appealingly eerie song that rather hits me as being Ryuichi Sakamoto-esque in arrangement. I would say that it's even woozy as if the song were anthropomorphized into some drunken sot weaving through the alleys and under the city lights.

Arranged and composed by Goto, "The Night Landing" is given its sultry and whispery vocals by songwriter Etsuko Yamakawa（山川恵津子）who's guesting here. Yamakawa is also a figure who usually is in "the back office" as it were with composing, but of course, she's also had her time behind the microphone as one-half of the duo Tohoku Shinkansen（東北新幹線）. Keiko Aso（麻生圭子）provides the lyrics.

Adding to that overall feeling of wooziness and disorientation is that rubbery-sounding instrument. I'm not sure whether that's some sort of synthesizer or a specially-adapted guitar (sounds like the love child of a blues guitar and a theremin), but it has such an effect that I don't think I could call "The Night Landing" a City Pop song per se. Perhaps I can categorize it as a form of technopop.