Well, the last 24 hours have been rather problematic ones between me and my computer...the equivalent of a marital spat, perhaps. My laptop for whatever reason (glitch, virus or digital aneurysm) decided to break down on me which necessitated performing a Complete Restore...basically the Nuclear Option. I lost a lot of personal files and photos (though they are backed up on USBs and other external HDs) and had to do quite a bit of software recovery which meant that blogging on my beloved KKP wasn't possible until today.
So, before I lay me down to sleep tonight, I'm going to go with something rather weird and fanciful. I didn't know about this album until a few nights ago when I came across it on YouTube, but being a Yellow Magic Orchestra fan, I was rather intrigued by Haruomi Hosono's（細野晴臣）first solo effort after the initial hiatus of his seminal technopop band in the early 80s. I remember nikala talking about his time tackling the genre of old-time exotica back in the 70s before he, Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）and Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸弘）discovered their inner synthesizers, and so it was interesting to see and hear Hosono carry that techno football and run with it solo.
"Strange Love" was the first track on Side B of "S-F-X" which came out in December 1984. It was written and composed by Hosono with Peter Barakan providing the English part of the lyrics. To me, it has that minimalist air that the later YMO songs tended to have, instead of the earlier hits which paid tribute to other musical genres such as surf rock and the aforementioned exotica. At this point, I'm not quite sure whether Hosono was paying his own tribute to the famous Peter Sellers role of Dr. Strangelove in the titular movie. However, I am still quite sure that he doesn't have the most melodic of voices.
Another reason that I decided to go with "Strange Love" was that I have an affinity for another technopop...or perhaps I should say, technodance...song which had a similar title, and had the whole bunch of us running to the dance floor whenever it got played at the old discos.
And you know as I write this, I think Depeche Mode's "Strangelove" would be perfect for this time (close to midnight) at the old Copa.
I'm sorry for the trouble from your laptop. Hope you don't lose any precious file.
ReplyDeletetechno isn't my cup of tea, so I listened to the song but hardly have anything to say : )
Thanks for the good wishes, May. I didn't lose anything that couldn't be backed up.
DeleteNo problems on techno not being your cup of tea. I've got a pretty wide range of genres that I like (although heavy metal and punk are not included) so I don't expect everybody to like everything I put up. :)