Salon Music -- Duet ni Muchuu（デュエットに夢中）

 

I heard about this New Wave duo called Salon Music some weeks ago via a "Holly Jolly X'masu" podcast and I've already bookmarked one of their Christmas contributions, so I'll cover that probably in December once KKP gets into its Xmas mode once more.

But for today, I thought that I would introduce Salon Music and one of their conventional tunes first. Consisting of vocalist and bassist Jin Yoshida（吉田仁）and vocalist and keyboardist Hitomi Takenaka（竹中仁見）, Salon Music formed during the rising days of New Wave in 1980. They've never broken up officially and up to 2011, they have released 17 albums and an unknown number of singles according to their J-Wiki profile.

One such single is their July 1983 release "Duet ni Muchuu" (Wrapped Up in Duet). Written and composed by Takenaka, right from the get-go, I can hear and feel the New Waviness and perhaps even see her and Yoshida doing an appropriate dance on the floor. In fact, the dance I'm thinking about is the one that Jane Wiedlin and Ron Mael from the band Sparks did in that music video "Cool Places", also from the same year (coincidentally, Salon Music opened up for Sparks in 2001). "Duet ni Muchuu" is definitely short and sweet at a shade over 2 1/2 minutes.

Not sure whether Takenaka did any solo work outside of Salon Music but Yoshida has gone onto producing the works of other acts including Flipper's Guitar（フリッパーズ・ギター）from 1990.