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Dec 21, 2021 Web Exclusive By Austin Saalman

Every so often, a long-hidden artifact is unearthed from the fathomless annals of popular culture to be carried forth and presented anew as a fresh revelation. Nippon Columbia and DJ Notoya’s own revelation transports listeners to a fabled place in an intriguing era: Tokyo in the mid-1970s and ’80s. Featuring 18 solid tracks selected by Notoya from Nippon Columbia’s expansive vaults, comprehensive double LP Tokyo Glow showcases the lesser-known gems of the bustling metropolis’s stellar city pop movement—an eclectic category of R&B/soul, funk, boogie, and jazz fusion-influenced J-pop, often associated with a romantic, tech-centric vision of the future. Eventually dismissed by much of the Japanese mainstream after its heyday, classic city pop recordings have maintained devoted cult followings among DJs and musicians, who share a collective appreciation of the genre’s intricate compositions and skilled arrangements, as well as its wistfully sleek, nostalgia-saturated nuances. A prominent participant among this following, Notoya remains a leading city pop scholar and collector, his vast knowledge of the movement’s catalog, history, and cultural implications rendering him the appropriate authority in both compiling and representing Tokyo Glow. His selections consist of intimate classics and enviable rarities, the twilit dreamscapes conjured from each lyric and note becoming strange holidays from what has become for many an overwhelmingly bleak present.

While every track featured on Tokyo Glow is rich in merit, there are most certainly a handful of sublime standouts. Opening cut “Kimagure,” actress Kumi Nakamura’s shimmering 1980-released jazz fusion micro-journey, stands as one of the record’s finest inclusions, itself a rarity by which Notoya remains especially captured. “Kimagure” was recorded early in Nakamura’s career, the album from which it was selected standing as her first and final musical endeavor, making the track an especially valuable inclusion. Subsequently, Miyuki Maki’s brass and synth-flourished “Indo No Michibata” and Haruyoshi Yamashina’s balmy yacht rock jam “Osake to Joke” paint vivid portraits of a picturesque 1980s Tokyo. The late Hatsumi Shibata’s textured funk ballad “Party Is Over” and Hiroshi Sato’s “Saigo No Tejina” rival any of the era’s radio pop sounds emerging from the west. Meanwhile, New Generation Company’s soundtrack instrumental “I Wander All Alone (Part 3)” and Hitomi “Penny” Tohyama’s 1983-released dance pop number “Tuxedo Connection” thrill through and through, recalling the stellar hue of city lights woven across a silhouetted skyline and the prospect of love and excitement therein. That said, Tokyo Glow’s key inclusions are most certainly Sumiko Yamagata’s “Natsu No Hikari Ni” and Makoto Iwabuchi’s “Moonlight Flight.” The former, released in 1976, is a mystical AOR masterpiece, the latter a lushly orchestral fantasy alive with a bleary air of nocturnal melancholia. Both Yamagata and Iwobuchi remain among their genre’s most skilled contributors, their respective works successfully pulling Tokyo Glow together as a worthy soundtrack to a unique era in one region’s socioeconomic history.

While remaining of niche interest, Tokyo Glow will satisfy both Notoya’s fans and many J-pop enthusiasts alike, while offering potential appeal to the uninitiated—especially those invested in the sounds of ’70s and ’80s soft rock and lounge music. Still, the city pop subgenre has most certainly garnered greater interest among Western audiences over the past decade. “I know a lot of Japanese music imitates aspects of music from the U.S.,” Notoya explained back in June during a conversation with BBC Radio’s Nick Luscombe. “But Japanese music sounds new to [Americans] partly because back in the ’70s and ’80s, the Japanese record labels didn’t promote their releases overseas so foreign people didn’t know about these records at all. When they listen to original city pop, they feel that they may have listened to these records before, but there’s very little chance they actually did!” Indeed, the sounds of Tokyo Glow may very well possess a degree of familiarity to many, but like that of an artificial memory, the experience, especially for those in the west, will feel somehow external. An underground miniature encyclopedia of pop musical devices, a neon orgy of ultramodern sensibilities and aspirations, an electric fantasy of the 20th century’s leisure class—Tokyo Glow functions as each of these and more. It invites the listener on an atmospheric adventure into an alternate history, in which the hopes and dreams of modern industry remain intact within the tape decks of sleek automobiles racing down crowded highways by night. Here, the heart of a crystal city remains aglow with the possibilities of eternal youth still alive and well inside the vaults of Nippon Columbia. (www.columbia.jp)

Author rating: 8/10