Perfume -- Polygon Wave（ポリゴンウェイヴ）

 

"Karl Heinz, you are beautiful and angular...and if you were a gas, you would be inert."

Yes, one of the many hilarious quotes from German minimalist Dieter, one of Mike Myers' famous characters from his time on "Saturday Night Live". Chock-filled with all sorts of avant-garde parody, each episode of Dieter's show "Sprockets" ended with everyone's need to dance...angularly, of course.

Now, I've written about the technopop song-and-dance trio Perfume for years, but for some reason, their September 2021 single "Polygon Wave" especially keeps me reminded of Dieter and "Sprockets". Maybe it's because of that polygon in the title which is indeed angular by nature.

As usual, the song was written, composed and arranged by Yasutaka Nakata（中田ヤスタカ）, and it's also something that the Vaporwavers and their associates would just love because of that 1980s aural A-E-S-T-H-E-T-I-C in there. Plus, you also have all of those shapes and grid lines along with that drive with the ladies on the Tokyo Rainbow Bridge, to boot. What's not to love about this?

Also as has been the case for several years, Perfume came on the Kohaku Utagassen once more to perform "Polygon Wave". The single came out as the trio's very first EP which hit No. 2 on Oricon. Although I've categorized the song as technopop, it's been categorized on both J-Wiki and Wikipedia as a J-Pop and a Nu-disco tune.