Junko Ohashi & Minowa Central Station -- Journey to the Mind ~ Pamir no Yoake（パミールの夜明け）

By AmanovDmitry via Wikimedia Commons

I'll be honest and state that it was because of this song that I had even heard of the Pamir Mountains located in Central and South Asia. Geography and City Pop...what a combination!

Strangely enough, this might be my first example of a hybrid between Exotic kayo and City Pop via "Journey to the Mind ~ Pamir no Yoake" (Dawn Over the Pamirs), the first track on Junko Ohashi & Minowa Central Station's（大橋純子＆美乃家セントラル・ステイション）June 1978 album "Shalom"（沙浪夢）. As written, composed and arranged by Masami Tsuchiya（土屋昌巳）with Ohashi helping out on lyrics and Kenjiro Oda（小田健二郎）assisting on the music, it's certainly got the funkiness of Ohashi's brand of City Pop, but at the same time, there is also something indeed rather exotic about it, as if all this was playing out on some sort of Cessna hundreds of metres above the titular Pamirs themselves. It's also got some rock in there and a weirdly filtered boozy saxophone that pops up at times. It contrasts quite nicely with the second track "Kisetsufuu Tayori"（季節風便り）.