Tomoco Yasuno -- flower bird wind moon

 

I sometimes get a tad irritated when a singer or band gets a little cute with their name. I was looking for Tomoko Yasuno（安野ともこ）for a while but not finding her on the usual list. I swore that she had been included onto KKP years ago but couldn't find any hint of the lass when I realized from other sources that I took down her name as it was stylized back in the 1980s: Tomoco instead of Tomoko.

Well, I did eventually find the article for her 1985 "Mysterieux", a French pop-sounding technopop confection helped out by lyricist Michio Akiyama（秋山道男）and composer Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）. The music side of her career was very brief and she's mostly been in the design of fashion and jewelry. From her J-Wiki profile, in fact, I did discover that she had actually designed the outfit for award-winning figure skater Mao Asada（浅田真央）when she competed at the Sochi Olympics a decade ago.

But getting back to her music, it's apparent that Yasuno and company were still in thrall to their Gallic technopop. In November 1984, she released the album "La Musique Exotique" with one track being "flower bird wind moon", designed by the same Akiyama and Hosono. The first third of this six-minute-and-change song consists of burbling sounds as if the microphone had been traveling through a silver jungle of chromic life before Yasuno finally makes her voice heard. The tempo is more measured here and the atmosphere changes into some romance-mystery in a small town in France.