Yellow Magic Orchestra 
(A&M)
Written by Yellow Magic Orchestra
Produced by Yellow Magic Orchestra
LP Track 
Although Computer Game only made it to #67 on the Disco Chart, it was a harbinger of things to come. Formed in 1978 by three Japanese musicians, Yellow Magic Orchestra (aka YMO) quickly joined Kraftwerk as the most widely recognized purveyors of computer pop. 
Criticized for emotionally empty machine-powered music, YMO was a major influence on later technopop bands such as Human League, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, and OMD. Richard Harrington summarized YMO's music in the Washington Post (June 17, 1981) as "they have taken away all the trimmings and left a skeleton of hooks and swells, oscillator sweeps and clipped vocals." 
Recently, YMO's music was released in a remix collection with reworkings by some of today's top techno producers including Orbital, 808 State and the Shamen. 
The Washington Post

Copyright 1979 The Washington Post
November 6, 1979, Tuesday 

BYLINE: Harry Sumrall 
The Yellow Magic Orchestra has tons of high-energy, electronic sound. 
Armed with a battery of synthesizers, electric guitars, keyboards and drums, foot pedals, headphones and miles of wire, the three-piece "Orchestra" (and three assistants) appeared at the Bayou Sunday night. 
They call their music "Technopops," but other words also come to mind. Transistorized Tchaikovsky. Diode Disco. Robot Rock. Their songs were an electric blend of classical harmonic layers, pop melodies and heavy rock 'n' roll riffs, all of which were reduced to a dreary, mechanical mush. The musicians never added a human touch to their playing. They preferred to let their gadgets do their work for them and, at times, it wasn't clear whether the men were playing the machines or vice versa. The result was an incessant drone which blurred any musical thought or substance.
The trailblazing force behind the emergence of the Japanese techno-pop sound of the late '70s, Yellow Magic Orchestra remains a seminal influence on contemporary electronic music -- hugely popular both at home and abroad, their pioneering use of synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines places them second only to Kraftwerk as innovators of today's electronic culture. YMO was formed in Tokyo in 1978 by keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto, who at the time was working on his debut solo LP; among his collaborators was drummer Yukihiro Takahashi, himself also a solo performer as well as a member of the art-rock group the Sadistic Mika Band. The third member, bassist Haruomi Hosono, boasted an even more impressive discography, including four solo records as well as a number of production credits. 
Agreeing to join forces as Yellow Magic Orchestra, the trio soon debuted with a self-titled LP influenced largely by the robotic iconography of Germany's Kraftwerk; 1979's Solid State Survivor heralded a quantum leap in their sound, with stronger songs and a more focused use of electronic tools, complete with English lyrics by Chris Mosdell. While 1980's X Multiplies was at best a mixed bag including comedy skits and two different covers of the Archie Bell & the Drells classic "Tighten Up," Public Pressure captured <>... read more
Disco's Bleak New Wave
The Washington Post

Copyright 1981 The Washington Post
June 17, 1981, Wednesday 

BYLINE: By Richard Harrington 
Disco didn't die; it was simply transported to Europe, bleached and recycled as Futurism or the New Romanticism. Although it has yet to catch on in America in any big way, Futurism -- or White Disco -- is the ungainly consequence of the technocrat invasion in contemporary music. 
It's also an extreme example of fashion preceding style: European youth (particularly in German and England) found themselves all dressed up with no place to go. Now the cabarets and dance clubs abound with the bleak, leaden beats of Spandau Ballet, Gary Numan, John Foxx, Visge, The Human League, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Landscape and company. The music is burdened by the use of computers, artificial rhythm machines, electronic montages and mathematical arrngements. 
German's Kraftwerk was a precursor of the genre, but the group's first album in three years, "Computerworld" (Warner Bros. HS3549) is a dismal compendium of technopop. It's all art and no heart, and if there's an irony in Kraftwerk's celebration of the dangers of technology, it has been completely obscured. 
Mathematical melodies, metronomic pulse beats and dank and drab vocals do little to elevate witless ditties like "Pocket Calculator," "Computer Love" and the group's unintended anthem, "It's More Fun to Compute." Like much Futurist posing, Kraftwerk is not only humorless but also aloof; someone once referred to the performance as "mechanical men making automatic music." 
It's music for a modern dance in which there's no emotional or physical contact; "change partners" has been replaced with "change patterns," and don't let anybody catch you smiling. There have been persistent stories that when Kraftwerk tours again its music will be performed by robots. It takes some hard listening to feel that's not the case already. 
Like Kraftwerk, England's Spandau Ballet builds upon synthesized syncopations, occasionally sneaking in a funk rhythm, but for the most part pressing out a pneumatic brand of rock so transparently contrived that one feels like spiriting poets and dreamers into the lab to save the word. Spandau's vision on "Journeys to Glory" (Chrysalis CHR1331) is typically Futurist clumsy themes passed off as abstract intellectualism. The result, particularly on their hit single "To Cut a Long Story Short," is ponderously serious, a calculated waterfall of electronic sequences that miniaturize the warmth and emotion we have come to expect in music and art. 
Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra, like Kraftwerk, concentrates on synthesizerladen melodies evoked within rigid time signatures. As technopop analysts, they have taken away all the trimmings and left a skeleton of hooks and swells, oscillator sweeps and clipped vocals. Unlike their previous work, "BGM" (A&M 4853) is humorless and not even suited for what its title suggests: background music. 
Landscape's "From the Tea Rooms of Mars . . . to the Hell Hole of Uranus" (RCA AFL1-4056) contains a similarly sterile clinical atmosphere, despite more familiar textures from the jazz-rock fusion school. Like almost all of the records mentioned, it has one snappy single, "European Man," that validates its existence. But, like all of the other albums, it is consistently dry and uneventful. 
Plugging into an electric cocoon, the Futurists have created a rigid frame without providing a meaningful picture; it's a passionless dance music that neither the dancers nor the players need to participate in. It's a music of extreme pretension, pushed by a most artificial pacemaker. Bring back the old mama heartbeat.
Yellow Magic Orchestra CD Review
BPI Entertainment News Wire

Copyright 1992 BPI Communications
September 4, 1992, Friday 

YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA - Yellow Magic Orchestra (Restless) 
Ryuichi Sakamoto's path-breaking synth band's 1978 debut album sounds as though it could have been recorded this year, its production values are so far ahead of their time. While not the first techno-dance outfit (Kraftwerk preceded and influenced Y.M.O.), this Japanese trio crafted sophisticated, melodic tunes with sequencers, drum machines and other electronic artillery before many of its European and American counterparts had ever laid their fingers on a synthesizer.
Technodon Concert Review
Billboard

Copyright 1993 Billboard Publications, Inc.
August 14, 1993 

YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA - Technodon Concert Review 
JAPAN: YMO, or the Yellow Magic Orchestra, as the group previously was known, is not the most visually exciting group in the world, particularly when the venue for the band's recent reunion concert is the cavernous Tokyo Dome. Keith Emerson-style histrionics are worlds away from the decidedly more cerebral approach of YMO's Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono, and Yukihiro Takahashi. Instead of seeing people setting pianos on fire and the like, the 50,000-odd fans who attended YMO's reunion concert were treated to a state-of-the-art computer graphics display on huge screens on either side of the stage, providing the necessary visual complement to YMO's spacey, yet pop-tinged, music. The show consisted almost entirely of selections from YMO's new album, "Technodon," the group's first effort in 10 years. Tracks like "Superman," which features the dulcet tones of Beat Generation icon William Burroughs (as his craggy visage appeared on screen), verged on the ambient, with repetitive musical phrases and gentle washes of sound predominant. By contrast, old YMO tunes with lots of obvious hooks, such as "Fire Cracker," were played with much more of a pop feel. The one element lacking from the concert was spontaneity, and only during the encore was there any real feeling of warmth or involvement. An intellectually satisfying comeback show, to be sure, but a little more "rebop," as Lester Bangs put it, would have helped.
YMO Woos the "Techno Children"
The Nikkei Weekly

Copyright 1993 Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc.
July 5, 1993 

HEADLINE: Yellow Magic Orchestra woos the 'techno children'; Japan's best-known techno- pioneers come back with a splash 
BYLINE: BY TORU HIROSE, Staff writer 
Together, they pioneered a uniquely Japanese brand of "techno-pop" in the late 1970s and influenced trends in music, fashion and pop culture. At the height of their popularity in the mid- 1980s, they abruptly quit the scene in favor of advancing their solo careers in different musical directions. Now, the Yellow Magic Orchestra has reunited and is back again. 
One of the few Japanese bands to gain wide international recognition in its time, YMO, as the members like to be known, has bridged nearly a decade of electronic music to reenter the music world with a slightly different brand of innovative sound. 
The three band members -- Ryuichi Sakamoto, Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi -- thrilled original fans and today's "techno children" with the release of a new album in May and a recent comeback concert in Tokyo. And just like any slick package, the band has a variety of promotional and merchandising deals, capitalizing on its previous popularity. 
No more party music 
In announcing the reunion last spring, Hosono insisted that the group was not seeking to jump back on the "mega-star merry-go-round." He warned "the group would no longer purvey its early brand of frenetic electronic party music." 
The new album, "Technodon," confirms Hosono's assertion. While synthesizers are still the group's mainstay, YMO's music has become more experimental than anything it performed in the past. 
The changes reflect the musical evolution of YMO's individual members and the influences they have brought back to the fold from solo musical careers in the decade after the group disbanded. 
Sakamoto, in particular, has made his mark internationally, undertaking various projects including composing the music for the opening ceremony at the Barcelona Olympics. He has also orchestrated film soundtracks such as "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" and followed that up by winning an Oscar for his score for "The Last Emperor." 
Despite individual successes, it is not easy to make a comeback in the cut-throat world of modern pop and rock, as any music critic will point out. But the favorable reception so far to YMO's revival augurs a new wave of popularity for the three musicians. 
Some critics say that much of the new enthusiasm for YMO stems from the current popularity of techno or "house" music -- spicy, synthesized sounds set to the frenetic electronic dance beats that are a nightly staple at trendy Tokyo discos. In these circles, YMO -- past and present -- is venerated as a techno innovator. 
The band's June 10 reunion concert, played to a sold-out crowd of 52,000, was opened by the Orb, a UK group that produces dreamy synthesizer sounds called "ambient house music." 
When YMO took the stage, three different video images were projected on huge screens hung around the auditorium. The images, synchronized with the band's performance, included messages, portraits and special effects. During the song "Dolphinicity," the message "Be good boys," was flashed in the shape of dolphins. 
The concert featured some pre-1984 YMO favorites but stressed new material. And judging by the enthusiastic responses of both the "techno teen" and "techno adult" components of the audience, YMO will be generating new waves in techno musical trends of the future.