Here, shards of new wave were crushed under marimba mallets and scattered into a steaming sea. Here, traditional Japanese taiko was stretched and refracted into slow, simmering, primeval techno, but from a time before techno had a clear name or lexicon, before it called Detroit or Düsseldorf its home. What I heard instead was a fractal slice of time, deeply psychedelic in its ability to warp the texture of lived experience. From the music itself, I expected the sounds of vintage Japanese pop with which I was vaguely familiar: sleek funk-flecked city pop, bombastic anime themes, and soapy teen idol hits. I stepped into his catalog blind, selecting 1981’s Left Handed Dream probably for its cover: a close-up photograph of Sakamoto’s face in a loose, softly abstract application of full kabuki makeup. That limited and linear understanding vaporized in my early twenties when I heard Yellow Magic Orchestra and the solo work of one of its members, the composer, producer, and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. Shoegaze, post-punk, no wave! Done, done, done! It mostly didn’t occur to me to venture outside of the West, because nothing in Young Marble Giants’ bare bones guitar pop or Harold Budd’s chilly piano mist ever offered me a convenient foothold. There followed a few frenzied years of CD ripping, torrenting, and downloading off of album-sharing blogs, until leapfrogging from one set of aesthetics the next area of understanding became like clearing levels on a video game.
I started with what was easily proximal (early aughts indie rock, mostly) and learned my way back from there.
At the time, I saw music in tidy, discrete categories: genres, periods, countries, scenes, and subcultures were clean brackets that made the whole of human sound more navigable. As a teenager, I figured out that I wanted to be a serious music listener and set about learning everything I thought would help me get there.
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