MOVES -- Moving Tracks

 

Still digesting my Swiss Chalet 1/4 Chicken dinner right now. And between ingestion and now, my metabolism had been working overtime in my gastrointestinal tract, but I was able to come across this rather rare and special album which perked me straight up.

From the website
Disques Blue-Very

"Moving Tracks" by the band MOVES was released in 1996 and the only thumbnail image of the album cover was found at the website that you see above. It is special since this was another band under the production of Keiichi Tomita（冨田恵一）, aka Tomita Lab（冨田ラボ）, and up to this point, I'd known this master composer and arranger as one-half of the late 80s technopop duo KEDGE and then the fellow who has come up with some very groovy and mellow J-urban contemporary starting from the early 2000s under that name of Tomita Lab with albums starting from "Shipbuilding". He has also been providing songs for other artists, notably the wonderful Kirinji（キリンジ）. And now I find out that he had this other project in between the 80s and the 00s.

The only information that I could glean about MOVES is from the aforementioned Disques Blue-Very in which the group consisted of composer Tomita and vocalist Emi Iwasaki（岩崎絵美）. "Moving Tracks" consists of two CDs filled with seven tracks. Unfortunately, I could only find two songs represented on YouTube with the one above being "Portrait no Sora"（ポートレートの空...The Sky in the Portrait） which is a cheerful and wistful tune written by Ryutaro Kihara（キハラ龍太郎）. It rather hovers between the genres of pop and Shibuya-kei.

"Ice Tea ga Suki?"（アイスティーが好き？...You Like Iced Tea?） gets more into the Shibuya-kei via some jangly guitars reminiscent of Flipper's Guitar, but the Disques Blue-Very site states that there is also some Pizzicato Five in the arrangement. It's all good. The lyrics here were provided by Satoshi Tazawa（田沢智）. Unfortunately, it seems that the album has been discontinued so auctions may be the only way to get "Moving Tracks", but for those Tomita fans, it could be worth getting just to hear the man in Shibuya-kei mode compared to his earlier City Pop/synthpop days with KEDGE and then his later discography involving urban pop or Neo-City Pop in the new century.