MORNING MUSIC:
“Taiji No Yume” by Yoshiko Sai
This 9-minute track is taken from the 1977 album of the same name. I’ve read the title translated into English as “Fetal Dream.” Hard to say what’s going on here, other than it’s a nice piece of music to sit in the middle of and submit to. There’s a complicated blend of styles which I couldn’t do justice trying to explain. Something along the lines of a East-Asian acid-folk (recalling to my ears the gentle, ethereal vocals of Kim Jung Mi) being mixed up with highly orchestrated bossa, or maybe more fittingly, tropicalia production, and then smashed up against a fusion-y drifting into free-jazz freak out towards the end. Yoshiko Sai’s vocals, sort of drifting over the proceedings, sometimes singing words, sometimes speaking, sometimes just pushing out haunting breaths for the sake of texture, give a loose binding to the incredible what-the-fuck--oh-yes-ness of the piece. She was 24 when she wrote and recorded this album. The outstanding arrangements are the work of Yuji Ohno who collaborated on this album.
I can’t find this album on the normal streaming services, but there’s a smattering of her output on youtube. There’s also not much information about her on the web. Apparently she retired at 25. I couldn’t find mention of her in popular music scholarship on Japan, which seems crazy to me, because this record is insanely cool and there’s so much going on that can be richly pulled apart. I mean, that flamenco guitar which runs in and out of the whole piece, where does that come from? Were Yuji Ohno or Yoshiko Sai, or whoever else was involved in the record, huge Black Saint And The Sinner Lady Fans? Was the bossa influence the result of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil? And it’s not just a crazy, mixed up record, it’s also really, really good, enjoyable and challenging and fun and dark. So, hopefully, some more hunting can be done through the dark powers of the internet and I can track done a copy of this album in full and give it some more thought.
For further reading, I found this article which is unsourced and I can’t vouch for the accuracy of, but is pretty interesting and provides some interesting biographical information.
Also, her 1976 album Mikko has been reissued and is available on Spotify and you can hear her 1975 debut here, a much more straight forward folk-rock affair titled Mangekyou.
