Bach Revolution & Susumu Hirasawa -- Dummy no Sakuryaku（ダミーの策略）

 

Over the past few years, I've featured the underrated group P-Model which included musician and producer Susumu Hirasawa（平沢進）. In his button-down way, he has been quite the flamboyant artist all these years.

Well, a few days ago, commenter YMOfan04 was kind enough to leave me a link to the above YouTube video which has turned out to be quite the revelation. First off, it opened me to an earlier Hirasawa who had once been part of a 1970s progressive rock band called Mandrake. It lasted for about five years but it looks like the group was petering out of ideas and was undergoing a crisis of faith. Then in 1978, Hirasawa was hired via the Electro Sound Corporation to help out at the Yamaha Music Foundation teaching synthesizer. 

Meanwhile, ESC's house band, Bach Revolution consisting of Kazutaka Tazaki（田崎和隆）and Akiro Kamio（神尾明朗）, then created the album "Synthetic Study" that year to help folks study and use the Yamaha CS-10 synthesizer. Hirasawa entered a contest which involved submitting synthesizer pieces to be judged by a panel which included Bach Revolution. His entry got quite a lot of accolades from the panel which also included the legendary Isao Tomita（冨田 勲）as the head judge. 

Finally, Bach Revolution & Hirasawa collaborated on one song, the 1978 "Dummy no Sakuryaku" (A Dummy's Trick) which ended up as the B-side to a 7" flexi-disc whose A-side contained Jun Fukamachi's（深町純）"Ad-Lib Keyboard Take A". The overall disc was titled "Rock & Keyboard '79 Synthesizer Furoku Record"（ロック&キーボード'79 シンセサイザー 附録レコード...Supplementary Record） and it was released just some days before the target of this week's Reminiscings of Youth profile.

"Dummy no Sakuryaku" is narrated by Hirasawa via a vocoder as The Dummy himself who could be robot, android, cyborg or whatever artificial life you can think up of, but perhaps he's also quite the mastermind. There is something of that epic and fanfare-ish Tomita arrangement which launches the four-minute-and-a-half song but I also couldn't help feel that it could have also backed up any early 1980s episode of "Doctor Who" with Tom Baker or Peter Davison. As well, there are feelings of child-like curiosity and adult mastery as perhaps the Dummy is no longer such a dummy.