Monday, October 1, 2018

Mioko Yamaguchi -- Itsuka Yurarete Tooi Kuni(いつかゆられて遠い国)


Late last week, I received an e-mail from Eamonn at the University of Glasgow who hosts "chOOn!!" on Subcity Radio. His monthly program covers a wide variety of music from all over the planet including some of the more eclectic material from Japan, and so he wanted to let me know how much he enjoyed the works by singer-songwriter Mioko Yamaguchi(山口美央子). His next show, incidentally, will be broadcast this Saturday (October 6th, 11-1pm GMT) and then available for streaming afterwards.


Eamonn's message reminded me of Ms. Yamaguchi, so I wanted to put up another song by her once more, and I'm going with one of her tracks on her debut album "Yume Hiko"(夢飛行)which I had written about in February this year. And as I had remarked for that 1980 release, Yamaguchi was trying all sorts of genres, which has been a boon for me, certainly, and I hope for the rest of her fans.

A track that I didn't cover in the "Yume Hiko" article is "Itsuka Yurarete Tooi Kuni" (A Distant Country to be Shaken Someday) which starts off right from Note 1 with a pleasant synthesizer hook. It's happily trippy and skippy and rather takes me off to YMO land to a certain extent, and there's indeed an underlying layer of being taken to some futuristic place in Asia for a whirlwind tour. The song definitely doesn't overstay its welcome at a shade over three minutes. In fact, I would say that it almost acts like a song for a montage scene of exploring the megalopolis in some cute Tokyo-based sci-fi/adventure movie.

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