Human Market catches Toshinori Kondo & IMA at an awkward and fascinating point between underground experiment and public spectacle. Recorded in 1987, issued by Alfa in Japan in 1988 and released in Europe by Jaro in 1989, the album is less immediately danceable than the group’s earlier electro-funk records. Its eight pieces still contain powerful drums, electric bass, guitars and synthesizers, but their relationships have become unstable. Grooves lurch, arrangements open unexpected gaps, and Kondo’s trumpet and rough vocals seem to address an urban world in which bodies, identities and musical styles are all being advertised, exchanged and consumed.
The title is a compact diagnosis. A “human market” could be a city, an entertainment industry, a labor system or any environment in which personality becomes merchandise. Kondo does not spell out a single interpretation, yet the album’s sound continually shifts between seduction and alienation. There are catchy figures, bright keyboards and emphatic choruses, but they appear inside arrangements that resist easy gratification. Pop language is present without the security normally promised by pop structure. The music knows how to attract attention, then deliberately makes that attention uncomfortable.
The core IMA lineup is one of Kondo’s strongest. Haruo Togashi contributes keyboards, synthesizers and background vocals; Reck and Taizo Sakai divide electric-guitar and bass responsibilities; and Hideo Yamaki supplies the album’s extraordinary drums and percussion. Kondo plays trumpet, sings and adds percussion. Vocalists Cybil Thomas, Annie Livingstone and Jananina Bianchi Chiols enlarge the record’s theatrical dimension, while nohkan player Yukihiro Isso and ōtsuzumi drummer Nobuyuki Shirasaka introduce sounds associated with Noh theater. Those traditional instruments are not isolated as exotic ornaments. They become active, sometimes disruptive presences inside IMA’s electric construction.
“Last Lost” begins in a state of double displacement. Even its title sounds grammatically stranded, as though ordinary language has broken under pressure. Yamaki’s drumming does not settle into the straight cyber-funk propulsion heard on Metal Position. Accents strike from oblique angles, and the rhythm seems to reorganize itself while the piece is already moving. Guitars supply blocks of texture rather than comfortable chordal support. Kondo’s trumpet enters as a damaged signal—bright, compressed and vocal in its agitation. The track establishes that Human Market will not offer the listener stable ground simply because it uses rock and funk instrumentation.
“Banana Plantation” places a deceptively colorful image over one of the album’s more troubling grooves. The title evokes tropical abundance, but also cultivation, labor and commodities prepared for distant consumers. IMA does not turn that implication into a literal protest song. Instead, the music makes pleasure feel inseparable from pressure. Bass and drums establish a heavy physical pattern while guitar and keyboards surround it with nervous detail. Kondo alternates between declarations and fractured responses, refusing the role of elegant jazz soloist. His trumpet behaves like a voice attempting to remain distinct inside a system designed to package every sound.
“Yellow Flag” continues the record’s language of signs and warnings. A flag is meant to communicate instantly, but Kondo’s arrangement complicates whatever message it might carry. Short instrumental gestures overlap, voices appear without providing explanation, and the rhythm moves through abrupt changes of emphasis. The performance is disciplined, yet it conveys agitation rather than control. Togashi’s keyboards are especially important throughout the album. Instead of merely filling space, they can harden the harmony, imitate an artificial environment or open an eerie area around the trumpet. Their colors make the music seem both contemporary and slightly unreal.
“H-Woman” is one of the record’s most compressed character studies. The unidentified initial turns its subject into a type, code or commodity label, while the music withholds any straightforward portrait. Kondo’s handling of voice is deliberately unpolished. He sings like someone forcing speech through a setting that would prefer a smoother product. The backing voices give the arrangement a pop dimension, but they do not neutralize his roughness. Instead, the contrast heightens it. The track suggests a commercial song being occupied from within by personalities too unruly to perform their assigned roles.
The second side opens with “Tokyo Girl,” the album’s clearest gesture toward a single. Female backing vocals and a more immediately graspable structure give it an almost manic brightness. Yet its pop appeal is exaggerated to the point of unease. The chorus is energetic, even celebratory, while the instrumental setting remains sharp-edged and crowded. The “Tokyo girl” can therefore be heard as person, image and commercial fantasy at once. Kondo does not stand outside this spectacle pretending moral purity; he participates in its excitement while making its mechanisms audible. That complicity gives the music greater force than a simple condemnation would possess.
“Moon Noom” turns the record inward. Its mirrored title resembles a phrase reflected until ordinary meaning disappears, and the music creates a similarly disorienting space. The arrangement is less dependent upon linear momentum, allowing sounds to hover and collide. Kondo’s trumpet becomes more atmospheric without becoming soothing. A sustained note can suggest loneliness, but electronic coloration prevents it from settling into conventional lyricism. The piece demonstrates how much IMA had changed since Taihen. The group no longer needed to place recognizable traditions beside funk in order to generate contrast; instability had entered the internal grammar of the band.
“Hoppoh,” meaning “north” or “northern direction,” is the album’s longest and most expansive piece. The nohkan and ōtsuzumi bring a piercing, ceremonial intensity, but Kondo refuses to present them in a museum-like frame. Their attacks meet electric guitar, synthesizer, trumpet and modern percussion as equal forces. The nohkan’s penetrating pitch is a particularly effective counterpart to Kondo’s electric trumpet: both instruments can cut through a dense field, but they carry different histories and physical techniques. Rather than arranging a tasteful meeting of old and new, IMA creates a contested space in which historical time seems to fold.
This is where Human Market most clearly transcends the era’s loose category of “world fusion.” The traditional instruments do not signify an uncomplicated Japanese essence, and the electric instrumentation does not represent a neutral modern present. Every sound arrives with cultural baggage. The musicians make those associations collide without pretending they can be reconciled in six minutes. Yamaki’s percussion gives the encounter a physical foundation, but his irregular accents prevent the rhythm from becoming a reassuring universal language. Difference remains audible.
“A Town in Your Heart” closes the record with Kondo at his most exposed. His weathered singing can initially appear technically limited beside the professional backing vocals heard elsewhere, but its emotional effect depends upon that limitation. He sounds less like a pop vocalist than a person insisting upon a song. The town of the title is private and remembered, set against the public marketplace that governs the album as a whole. After so much metallic urban agitation, the piece offers tenderness without becoming sentimental. Its relatively brief running time also prevents the feeling from being inflated into a grand finale.
The production reflects the album’s divided geography. Material was recorded at Metal Box Studio in Kawasaki and in Los Angeles, then mixed across studios in Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo. Eric Calvi’s mix and Howie Weinberg’s mastering give the record considerable impact, but they do not impose perfect uniformity. Some pieces feel dry and confrontational; others possess a larger, more polished spatial field. Instead of weakening the album, these differences reinforce its subject. Human Market sounds like music circulating between cities, studios and cultural economies while resisting complete standardization.
Its resistance can also make it a difficult record. Listeners expecting the locked dance rhythms of Metal Position may find the disrupted beats and crowded arrangements frustrating. Kondo’s vocals are expressive but intentionally coarse, and the backing singers sometimes push the music toward a theatrical excess that will divide opinion. Several tracks offer striking components without resolving them into wholly satisfying songs. The album’s uneasiness is productive, but not every experiment achieves equal clarity.
What holds Human Market together is the conviction of IMA’s ensemble sound. Yamaki’s drumming, Togashi’s synthetic environments and the guitar-bass exchanges of Reck and Sakai give Kondo something more complex than accompaniment. They create a changing social space in which his trumpet must negotiate, protest and occasionally surrender. The result is neither the clean jazz-funk suggested by some catalog descriptions nor a return to free improvisation. It is an urban avant-pop record whose very surfaces have become suspicious. Bright, abrasive and intermittently vulnerable, Human Market examines what happens when experimental music enters the marketplace and discovers that it can neither remain outside nor comfortably belong.
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