Susumu Hirasawa (Mandrake) -- Iriyou Hachi no Yuuwaku（いりよう蜂の誘惑）

John Severns via Wikimedia Commons

 

I'll tell you...I get all kinds of images when I listen to this one by technopop pioneer Susumu Hirasawa（平沢進）. This is about the earliest that I've gone in his long career and "Iriyou Hachi no Yuuwaku" (Temptation of a Bee) is part of his discography when he was with the progressive rock band Mandrake. 

Mandrake was a band I mentioned in my previous Hirasawa article back in October for "Dummy no Sakuryaku"（ダミーの策略）. By the time that this particular song came out, the band was pretty much on its last legs and to be honest, I don't think "Iriyou Hachi no Yuuwaku" sounds really anything prog rock. It sounds as if Hirasawa really wanted to show off this wonderful new genre called technopop. Anyways, "Iriyou Hachi no Yuuwaku" was a track on the compilation record titled "Synthetic Space" which was released in 1978.

Starting off with a ticking that reminded me of a disco version of the theme from the famed American newsmagazine show "60 Minutes" and then some really furious tearing out of pages from a book, the synths in this one really do sound as if a bee were falling into temptation. Then, it goes into something out of a Tex Avery cartoon before there is an ominous fadeout and fade-in which takes we listeners into a fearsome odyssey out of yet another 1980s "Doctor Who" episode. The intrepid bee comes sonically back leading to an apocalyptic conclusion...maybe this is the Butterfly Effect brought to its ultimate power. I can't even imagine what the production staff must have thought when this was recorded.

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.

Phnonpenh Model feat. Jun Togawa and Susumu Hirasawa -- MATANE（またね）

 

Phnonpenh Model

In 1994, former member Kotobuki Hikaru (key, prog) of P-MODEL, one of Japan's leading techno-pop bands, called on Taniguchi Maruta Masaaki (vo), who had been active in the Tokyo theater and live performance scene since the 1980s, and Lion Merry (key), who had played in the bands of Agata Morio and Togawa Jun. (Key), formed the group in response.

From the TuneCore profile

Just from reading the above and knowing what I know about P-Model, Jun Togawa（戸川純）and Masaaki Maruta Taniguchi（谷口マルタ正明）, I figured that Phnonpenh Model would be one heck of an avant-garde band. Of course, P-Model (including Susumu Hirasawa) and Togawa are represented here on KKP, but Taniguchi is someone that I've known from his appearances on Japanese television.

Phnonpenh Model is a band that I discovered only very recently because of a song that they released this year titled "MATANE" (See You Again), and it's quite the jangly number with some rock and techno in there. Plus, there is some of that exoticism that helps the band live up to its title (some of which is also the capital of Cambodia). Watching the music video is kinda like experiencing an absinthe-fueled fever dream after traveling to Southeast Asia. Drink in moderation, people!😵

Susumu Hirasawa -- Beacon

 

Back in high school, our teachers were woven from fairly standard cloth. However, one English teacher was definitely someone who went to the beat of his own drum. His raw intelligence, appearance and reputation were all quite massive, and he tended to go off on rather mighty tangents within class. Some of our comic relief students were more than willing to play off of him. My desk in his classroom was right in front of his desk, and he often confided to me through a whisper and a straight face just before class began, "Should I actually teach today, J?".

One rare thing that unfortunately I never got to see in his class but was witnessed and felt by some of my old classmates was THE TRIBAL EXPERIENCE. It's hard to describe but apparently Shakespeare could sometimes trigger that and when my English teacher was going through "MacBeth" and he came across the quote "...shall never vanquished be, until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him.", that sparked a major march with everyone in class participating as he himself led the troops to defeat MacBeth of Scotland. It must have been quite THE TRIBAL EXPERIENCE in 5th period in the afternoon.

Perhaps in a way, the video and title song which launches Susumu Hirasawa's（平沢進）July 2021 solo 14th album "Beacon" is something akin to THE TRIBAL EXPERIENCE that I never got to feel in my teacher's class. It's been referred to as a religious experience and an avant-garde opera in the Hirasawa style. Seeing the man himself in the video in his dark "Matrix" cloak with that distinct white hairstyle while armed with that guitar and that distinctive voice, I can easily see him as a futuristic man of the cloth commanding a starship somewhere other than Earth. As for "Beacon" the album, it scored a No. 12 ranking on the Oricon weeklies.

Susumu Hirasawa -- Parade

 

I think I may have mentioned the Satoshi Kon（今敏）anime masterpiece "Paprika" (2006) that could give even David Lynch some major conniptions. Regrettably, I haven't been able to see the movie in its entirety but I have glimpsed what is supposed to be the climactic scene in the form of the most bizarre parade ever witnessed. It's dazzling, hilarious and terrifying at the same time especially when the human witnesses can change into most inhuman objects just by being there.

A soundtrack for just this scene alone would probably need someone just as avant-garde as Kon and his ideas. So, P-Model's Susumu Hirasawa（平沢進）was just the guy for this project. And indeed, the soundtrack's "Parade" is a grand technopop march that also dazzles and terrifies at the same time. Meanwhile Hirasawa exhorts the nightmare that can result if one gets a little too much into consumerism and pop culture to the isolation of all else. I think just for the parade scene alone, "Paprika" probably could have been included in any "Midnight Madness" segment of a major film festival.