Certain albums are pretty hard to justify, or quantify, the how, when, or why to share. Salon Music’s O Boy isn’t one of them. My only regret is how long it’s taken me to get to writing about it. Far from being “alien” to any of your musical taste — in its proto-shoegaze, proto-noise, dream pop — we get to share an album that precisely captures some of the brilliant leftfield Japanese music still remarkably hidden in plainview from us simply because of quirks in history…yet here it is in it’s own alcove of something special.
Originally released in 1988, O Boy suffers the fate some albums do of predicting a future perhaps many weren’t quite “there” to understand for their creators. Looking back in hindsight, one could argue, Salon Music’s calling card has always been just that – stick their neck out there and forget where the guillotine falls.
Salon Music’s beginnings can be found in the storied Shibuya district of Tokyo. It was in the area’s burgeoning fashion and music districts that the duo of Hitomi Takenaka and Zin Yoshida in the early ‘80s began their now decades long relationship. Bonding over an early, shared love of cassette culture, they’d evolve from sharing bootlegged C86-comp tapes to exploring early musical albums from the likes of Sparks or groups from the British New Wave and post-punk scene. Then some day both classically-trained multi-instrumentalists decided they should take the next logical step: start a band.
In 1981, Salon Music was born. From the start they were a bit of an odd bird. Rather than seek a record deal, some of their earliest recordings – recordings that ran the gamut from jazz, techno pop to art pop, and tweed VU-influenced rock – pushed them to experiment with doing DIY pressings. Then, rather than release them in Japan, they’d send them to London or Paris labels hoping to get signed by a European company. It would be a certain song, “Hunting On Paris”, a slice of B-52ish pop, that would secure them their first Japanese record deal and with label backing, their first hit single on Pony Canyon.
Early Salon Music might not give you a full glimpse of what they might blossom into later but they did give you an idea of the mercurial vision of the duo. Initially, Hitomi Takenaka’s contributions were to the dreamier, sweeter, more atmospheric side of Salon Music. Zin Yoshida, arguably, preferred the harder-nosed “rock” and psychedelic side of musc. Young as they were during the time of My Girl Friday, it was that naivety that allowed them to take bits and bobbles of various eras and styles to create their brand of New Wave.
If ever there was a close Japanese analog to England’s XTC, I’d argue early Salon Music was it. On albums like, La Paloma Show (produced by YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi), or 1985’s Topless, you can easily hear a group moving away from the more dated, electronic, New Wave sound of the era, and beginning to draw from pop’s earlier more trippier, less-defined regions. On songs like “Voice From Tangier”, “Paradise Lost”, “Topless”, and “Pour Me More” one can certainly see how influential they’d become to groups in the Shibuya-kei a decade later (some of whom they’d go on to produce and/or found). However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, one could argue that Salon Music took their most deliberate step yet a year later in 1987’s This Is Salon Music.
I’ll make a weird analogy but I hope you’ll get it: if Salon Music’s O Boy is their Loveless, then This Is Salon Music was their This Is Your Bloody Valentine. Ignoring all the chart success they had with their youthful pop, Salon Music’s This Is Salon is the sound of them letting go of their ego and superego, going full id. Here the influence of the Chameleons, Echo and The Bunnymen, Jesus and The Mary Chain, The Cure, and other proponents of a more nebulous neo psychedelic sound can be distinctly heard. With amps set to eleven and keyboards replaced by myriad guitar pedals, the new Salon Music was (once again) unlike little else in Japan.
The funny thing is that when they traded their keys for guitar strings and the future for some past, they received in return some of their most incisive, dare I say, “adult” writing yet. Songs like “Into You” chug along like forgotten ferocious Stooge-ian punk. Others like “One Day Like Today” predict the sounds of the askew exotica of Stereolab and owe some debt to groups like Young Marble Giants, who saw some other avenue for electroacoustic ambiance. One can hear the imprint of Skylarking or Mr. Andy Partridge (especially it’s dayglo production) on songs like “明日の風” and “午後の印象”. In a year that saw Mr. Sakamoto released a new-style electro-pop album, 1987’s Neo Geo, pointing at the future of “alternative” music; there was Salon Music doing it on their end with songs like “When She Comes” for J-indie music.
O Boy must have been a surprise even to their most loyal fans. What once was a slight dip in the neo-psychedelia waters now became a full step beyond the looking glass. Gone were their “cutesy” trappings, now Hitomi and Zin were openly tripping the light fantastic. Released in the period of Spacemen 3’s The Perfect Prescription, My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything and A.R. Kane’s 69, all totemic albums of next-gen dream pop, here came Salon Music to vibe out in London for a year beginning July 1987 – turning up the reverb, clocking out the fuzz and delay, dialing in the phaser to the heart of the sun, hoping to catapult a new sound to their homeland.
If you want to get a taste of what the new Salon Music was, take a listen to “In My Life”. Joined on marimba by Ron Mael of Sparks(!), Hitomi and Zin create a hypnotic, droning instrumental din more apt for a Jason Pierce record than anything in their past oeuvre. The title track, which opened the record, dreamily sung by Hitomi perfectly placed Salon Music in that pantheon of “shoegaze” bands. Off in England, they invited fellow wayward musicians like Quadraphonics’s Hajime Okano (who themselves were exploring a similar influence) to contribute multi-tracked guitars.
What gets me the most about this record is just how important it is to hear it loud. Songs like “I Am You” and “Sounds Of The Heroes” just beg to be blasted out of stereos. On the former, Stranglers-like post-punk gets taken to the ringer of the phased-out sound of “the pedal bands” and Salon Music’s mastery of this dialog gives it its own quasi-Screamadelica spin. As for the latter, unsung genius collaborator Sunshine Patteson (of Eddie & Sunshine) contributes a fascinating, driving track that recalls the influence of Heroes-era Bowie and motorik.
If you can appreciate ear-candy, tracks like Zin’s “Every Day, Every Night” venture beyond mere shoegaze, hitting on other regions of influence (perhaps Big Country’s arena pop) and dance music, rolling in drum machines to their wall of sound. Lovely proto-grunge tracks like “Fade Out”, take the stomp of glam and intimacy of the NY underground (think Sonic Youth) to create their own hazy duo sing-a-long. “Someday In Praha” punctuates that swirly “pink” ecstatic sound that many attempted but few nailed in execution.
The album winds down on another stunning track, “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”. Joined by the other Mael brother, Russell, together with Hitomi they share a jaw-dropping, heart-on-it’s-sleeve reimagining of Soft Cell’s hushed original. In the end, as Zin and Hitomi duet on their homage to Marc Bolan, “Life Is So Strange”, you could say this version of Salon Music (as strange as it seemed then) was the most impressive to experience. Guess that’s why one shouldn’t hold on to such secrets anymore…