Yoshiko Sai -- Taiji no Yume（胎児の夢）

Apple Music link

(excerpt only)

Yoshiko Sai's（佐井好子）"Taiji no Yume" (Infant's Dream) is quite the ride. The title track for the singer/poet's 3rd album in September 1977, it starts off as a lonely pianist's dreamy jazz riffing with Sai softly scatting away. Then a little over a minute into the song, it starts accelerating with a Latin guitar as an engine before the strings launch it into the heavens. From there, "Taiji no Yume" retains that Latin feeling but it also takes on the atmosphere of something grander and more operatic, perhaps fit for a movie soundtrack, thanks to the arrangement and Sai's vocals. I'm not quite sure if it would be too frivolous to designate this as a mere pop song which is why I categorized it as a New Music tune.

As we get into the latter half of this 9-minute-and-change epic, the rocket carrying "Taiji no Yume" seems to come straight down like a screaming missile and then even make a crash landing with both piano and then Latin guitar competing with each other on which can create the most sonic ruckus for close to a minute and a half. Finally, in the last several seconds, things go completely slow and spacey...I was expecting the Starchild from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to appear. As I said at the top, "Taiji no Yume" is quite the ride by Sai who wrote and composed it according to her website.

Initially, I'd thought that the song was a track from Sai's debut album "Mangekyo"（萬花鏡...Kaleidoscope） back in 1975, and "Taiji no Yume" could have fit that dramatic cover with the singer standing in the middle of those grassy hills. However, it had its own album which you can see here. It's got that weird and mystical design, and I think that the child in the glass vase minded by the cat (feel free to psychoanalyze) may actually be Sai herself.

One of the commenters for the YouTube video with "Taiji no Yume" noted that the title may refer to a concept from a mystery novel titled "Dogra Magra"（ドグラ・マグラ）written by Kyusaku Yumeno（夢野久作）, an author who had a flair for the surreal and avant-garde. The trailer for the 1988 movie adaptation is above and the plot involves a young man who wakes up in an asylum with his memory gone and the revelation that he killed his wife on their wedding day. There might be something akin to some of David Cronenberg's early movies there.