Somewhere between Solid State Survivor, Force Majeure and Danzindan-Pojidon you’ll find Shinichi Omata’s Boku・Neko・Platanus. Or rather you won’t – throughout his captivating debut from 1984, reissued by chOOn!! in 2022, you’ll hear connections to other music but its unique unbridled will keeps pushing those references out of mind.
Omata is a fascinating figure – an unsung hero of early Japanese electronic music who between 1981–84 recorded three albums of incredible DIY techno-pop while studying as a student in Tokyo. At University, Omata worked and collaborated as a sitar player and keyboardist with artists such as Hiroko Yoshihara, Takami, DEA and various members of the LLE music circle, where he developed an expressive fusion of minimal synth and psychedelia. The Japan of the late 1970s and early 80s was still largely a monoculture, lacking the substantial immigrant populations who brought the reggae and dub elements that so musically and politically energised pop, punk, post-punk and new wave in the West.
Japan – and Tokyo especially – was, however, going through a cultural renaissance of sorts, defined by some unlikely intersections between art and commerce. Department stores positioned themselves as bastions of the cultural avant garde; advertising copywriters were revered like poets. Within the music industry, the success of Yellow Magic Orchestra briefly opened up a space where experimentation, highbrow intellectualism and unabashed pop could co-exist.
That was the MO for Omata, whose first recordings abound with pointillistically pretty melodies, translucent textures and subliminal rhythms. This selection, lovingly extracted from his unreleased early recorded output, dating from 1981’s Neo Modernism through to 1983's With My Dog Ricky, demonstrates just how closely he clung to the original abstract ideal of moulding 8-bit bleeps and ungainly drum patterns into lo-fi triumphalism. On paper you wouldn’t give this aesthetic clash a pass were it not for the aural evidence of a unique sensibility, precociously openminded and visionary, charmingly transparent in respect of its influences yet possessed of a need for individuality.
Throughout this kaleidoscopic collection, all the ghost plastic in Omata’s head, Kosmische synthesis, synth-funk squiggles, arcade games and early Ambient is thrown together, reimagined and regarded affectionately – through a glass lightly, so to speak. The relentless aerobic rhythms, pristine surfaces and hyper-accelerated synthesizer lines that would later define Boku・Neko・Platanus are here in abundance. It’s cheap and colourful, all achieved by analogue means so that the joins are nicely exposed, reaching ecstatic heights where old forms are mutated and twisted like balloons into new animal shapes. Beneath the pulsing arpeggiated bleeps, Omata’s compositions show a remarkable economy and poise hinting at European classical influences - like a reimagining of Erik Satie’s piano miniatures that swaps 19th century Parisian boulevards for Tokyo’s 1980s technopolis. The music is sheer skin-puckering delight throughout, a delirious, mesmeric collage of dark disco bubblegum and eccentrically enchanting atmospheres that you cannot quite believe you’ve never heard before.
Available for the first time on vinyl and produced in cooperation with Shinichi Omata for chOOn!!, a label specialising in obscure, archival and forgotten releases.
