The other day, I received a comment from YMOfan04 underneath my posting on Yuki Saito's（斉藤由貴） "AXIA" album regarding another song of hers, "Mizu no Haru" (Spring by the Water). It is actually not on the June 1985 "AXIA", but on her third album "Chime"（チャイム）which was released in October 1986.
Even before playing it, I was struck by "Mizu no Haru", which I hadn't heard before because it wasn't part of a single and I never had a chance to listen to "Chime". The composer and arranger for the song was Kenjiro Sakiya（崎谷健次郎）, a singer and songwriter that I usually equated with groovy City Pop, and I had never known Saito to have tried the urban contemporary uber-genre; that was more Momoko Kikuchi's（菊池桃子）realm. Incidentally, Satoshi Takebe（武部聡志）co-arranged "Mizu no Haru" with Shun Taguchi（田口俊）providing the lyrics of a happy girl and her boyfriend enjoying a date along a pond.
Beginning with a boogie rat-a-tat drumming from a marching band, "Mizu no Haru" didn't turn out to be a City Pop tune. It was actually more of a jolly synthpop number that, if I hadn't checked the liner notes, I would have assumed to be something by the winning combo of Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）and Ryuichi Sakamoto（坂本龍一）. So I'm happy to hear that there were others who could come up with catchy and perky technopop tunes for aidoru singers of the 1980s.
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