Listening to Matt's recommended track from "Breeze", "Simpatia" is indeed a dreamy tropical mood maker of a number, complete with waves crashing into the shore. It's all-so-very comfortable with the Latin beat and the soft tones of the female vocalist, and on a couple of sites, this track and the album itself have been referred to as being Balearic in arrangement. I had to actually look up what Balearic was all about, and according to Wikipedia, it is "...an eclectic blend of DJ-led dance music that emerged in the mid-1980s..." and was "...named for its popularity among European nightclub and beach rave patrons on the Balearic island of Ibiza...", a Spanish island. One description of the song at one of the sites basically called "Simpatia" a love letter of sorts from Tokyo to Ibiza itself.
If memory serves, I did hear of this genre before when I was reading about a couple of Kazuhiro Nishimatsu's（西松一博）albums: "Aragon" and "Bouekifu Monogatari"（貿易風物語）. I've got very little knowledge about Balearic but listening to the selections in the above video for Balearic House, I'm not quite sure whether Atlas' "Simpatia" actually does fall into this genre of dance music. I can clearly hear synths in the song but I don't think that it really pushes "Simpatia" into dance music territory. If anything, it's the opposite; listeners would probably want to walk over to a lounge chair or a hammock and sip on a pineapple cocktail instead. Maybe Balearic AOR is more the thing here.
Yet, when I hear the song, I do think of futuristic resorts for some reason. Considering that Namba has also been a sci-fi writer, maybe a smile would come to his face if he ever read this.
Great find. Love Hiroyuki Namba's track The City of Silver Gray. I intend to purchase his albums at some point, including the prog group Sense of Wonder he was in, but they're usually hard to come by and when available tend to be rather expensive. Ugh. If only Japanese music was more readily accessible. The struggle continues...
ReplyDeleteAye, Michael. I hear you there. There are also a few albums that I would love to get my hands on but they still remain either nosebleed-expensive or discontinued.
DeleteAmazing how easily they could just transfer all those rare, obscure albums to digital format, put 'em up for sale and make some easy bread. I'll never understand the labels' rationale for just sitting on this stuff.
ReplyDeleteArtificial scarcity can create demand, or the illusion of it, but they don't even bother reissuing a lot of stuff and most of the stuff they do gets a very limited run. Good thing I was quick to snatch up rare/obscure finds like the Maison Ikkoku Complete Music Box because that stuff is much more expensive when you find it now. Pretty much everything is now. Speculators spoil the collectors market by artificially jacking up prices to the moon.
Not great for me either because I actually prefer to get the physical CDs instead of download digital. And even among those, when some of them are priced into the hundreds of dollars, even I have to pause.
DeleteIndeed. I too prefer physical when I can get it.
ReplyDeleteTook a quick glance at one recent offering of that Maison box set and it's going for almost $400! To put that into perspective it comes with 8 CDs, so essentially you'd be paying $50 a pop. No thanks to that. Don't care how good the music is, it's not worth that much money.