Sympathy Nervous -- Plastic Love

 

For those who have been regular patrons of the AI art gallery here on KKP over the past several months, the image above was what came out of the Bing machine when I threw in "Plastic Love" the title. Of course, that was for the Mariya Takeuchi（竹内まりや）hit.

It was about a year ago that I first found out about Yoshifumi Niinuma（新沼好文）, aka the technopop artist known as Sympathy Nervous, thanks to YMOfan04, our blog commenter on all things musical and computer-y. I initially covered his 1979 "Polaroid" which I described as the technopop accompaniment to a mole happily digging underground all over the backyard (I take it the homeowner was none too pleased, though).

Well, among his many other tracks that he created in 1979 and 1980, Sympathy Nervous came up with a song titled..."Plastic Love", ironically enough. This was indeed some years before Takeuchi and her husband, Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）, came up with the smooth and groovy song that launched a thousand ships, and indeed, Sympathy Nervous' ominous and intense "Plastic Love" is a whole different animal. In fact, I can't really think of any terrestrial animal for this one; this may be truly about plastic-based aliens on a multi-dimensional date. According to the artist's website, Niinuma's wife had been involved with at least one of the songs, so it may be her intoning words via a very haunting vocoder on this particular tune which ends with a lot of blasts of static.

Those tracks that he whipped up in 1979 and 1980 were apparently brought together to form an album titled "Plastic Love" which was released in 2012. Once again, the product came out some years before the more famous "Plastic Love" would blast out of YouTube as the herald of City Pop around the world.