Red City Smoke opens like an alarm from a metropolis already past the point of emergency. “Space Killer” combines a heavy, digitally sharpened rhythm with layers of guitar, keyboard and electronic noise, while Toshinori Kondo’s trumpet tears across the surface like a transmission forcing its way through interference. His voice is equally confrontational: less conventional singing than a mixture of command, chant and urban prophecy. The production has the hard, sample-conscious impact of early-1990s hip-hop and industrial dance music, but IMA never submits completely to either style. The music is too rhythmically unstable, too crowded with instrumental personalities and too willing to interrupt itself.
Released by Moon Records in October 1993, Red City Smoke became the final studio album by the original Kondo IMA project. Kondo announced the group’s dissolution at the end of that year and subsequently moved his base to Amsterdam, beginning the outdoor solo undertaking he called “Blow the Earth.” That later history makes it tempting to hear this record exclusively as a farewell to city life. The album certainly supports that interpretation—its titles are full of smoke, battle zones, killers, lovers and sorrow—but it does not sound like a band quietly packing its equipment. It sounds energized by the very urban pressure Kondo was preparing to leave.
The lineup differs significantly from the familiar IMA configuration heard on Tokyo Rose. Reck is absent, removing one of the band’s most abrasive electric personalities. Taizo Sakai carries the guitar role, Hideo Yamaki remains the rhythmic engine, and Haruo Togashi contributes keyboards and keyboard bass. Takahiro Watanabe also plays keyboard bass, while guitarist Mari Nishizono appears and adds vocals to “Moon Dream.” Kondo supplies electric trumpet, voice and keyboard bass. This altered instrumentation gives the record a more synthetic low end. Instead of a traditional bass guitar consistently grounding the music, programmed and keyboard-generated bass sounds become part of the album’s technological architecture.
That change does not make the performances less physical. Yamaki remains one of the most important reasons IMA’s electronic music avoids rigidity. His drumming can hit with machine-like precision, but he continually disturbs the apparent grid through displaced accents, compact fills and abrupt changes in weight. On “Space Killer” and “New Girl,” the rhythm feels engineered for immediate impact, yet small variations prevent it from becoming a static loop. Kondo understood that repetition becomes powerful when the listener can feel both its attraction and its threat. The beat invites movement while suggesting a system that may not permit anyone to stop.
“Temptation Flower” introduces a more sensuous dimension without softening the album’s surfaces. The flower of the title is attractive precisely because it may be dangerous. Kondo’s trumpet occupies that ambiguity. Effects enlarge and distort the tone, but his breath remains audible inside the electronic shell. He can produce a line of striking beauty and then break it with a hoarse attack or upward smear. The electric trumpet never functions merely as a fashionable texture. It is the unstable human center of the music: a voice whose physical source remains recognizable even when technology stretches it toward feedback, siren and synthetic light.
Across the opening half, Red City Smoke frequently resembles a science-fiction broadcast assembled from funk, hip-hop, avant-rock and damaged pop. “New Girl” places another human figure inside that environment, recalling IMA titles such as “Tea Girl,” “H-Woman” and “Tokyo Girl.” Kondo repeatedly used these compressed character types to investigate the point where an individual becomes an urban image. The “new girl” might be a person, a commodity, a fantasy or an identity continually reconstructed by fashion and media. The music refuses to distinguish neatly between excitement and alienation. Its brightness is genuine, but so is its suspicion.
“Lovers, Hold Up!” condenses that approach into one of the disc’s shortest and most direct songs. The title sounds like romantic advice interrupted by a robbery command. Love and danger occupy the same phrase, just as dance rhythm and sonic aggression occupy the same arrangement. Kondo’s vocals are crucial because their roughness prevents the material from becoming polished avant-pop. He does not present himself as a technically immaculate singer. He pushes words into the music until they become rhythmic objects, often sounding more like someone addressing a crowd through a failing public-address system than a vocalist performing inside a controlled studio.
“Blue Sky Battle Zone” contains the album’s strongest visual contradiction. An open blue sky ordinarily signifies freedom, calm or natural space; a battle zone transforms that openness into exposed territory. The title anticipates the division that would soon shape Kondo’s work. He was increasingly drawn toward playing trumpet outdoors, attempting to enter into dialogue with mountains, deserts, rivers and weather, yet he remained surrounded by the machinery and social conflict of the city. Here, the blue sky can still only be imagined through dense electric instrumentation. Nature appears as a contested possibility rather than a peaceful refuge.
The title track arrives at the album’s midpoint and presents the city as atmosphere. Smoke obscures objects without completely hiding them, changes the color of light and enters the lungs. It is an ideal image for Kondo’s music, which repeatedly blurs the line between external environment and internal bodily experience. Togashi’s contribution is particularly striking here, including a forceful piano passage that cuts through the electronic setting without sounding nostalgic. Acoustic piano does not restore an older, purer jazz language. It becomes another volatile material inside the red haze, percussive and urgent.
The album’s production is cleaner and more forceful than IMA’s mid-1980s records, but clarity does not mean simplicity. Sounds are placed with considerable definition, allowing drums and synthetic bass to land heavily while trumpet, guitar and keyboards retain separate profiles. At the same time, the arrangements contain enough competing information to create deliberate overload. This is where comparisons to Public Enemy’s densely layered production make sense, although IMA’s method remains grounded in band interaction. The record borrows hip-hop’s understanding of sound as collision without turning Kondo into a conventional rapper or Yamaki into a servant of sampled rhythm.
“SEQ57” reduces the language of the city to something resembling a machine designation. The title appears as “SEQ 57” on the Japanese release, though some later listings render it as “Sea 57.” The former better suits the album’s fascination with systems, coded identities and synthetic sequence. Its compact form functions as a hinge between the record’s urban confrontation and its more expansive closing movement. By this point, IMA’s sound no longer depends upon easily identifiable jazz solos placed over funk. Improvisation operates inside texture and timing: an accent arriving early, a trumpet tone deforming, a guitar figure refusing to resolve.
“Big Joy” is not merely comic relief after the album’s darker imagery. Kondo treats joy as an overwhelming physical force, large enough to become disruptive. The piece carries the rhythmic accessibility that had allowed IMA to reach listeners outside experimental jazz, but it retains the band’s refusal of smoothness. Joy is shouted, amplified and hammered into the beat. It is not offered as relaxation. The title also matters within the album’s emotional design. After killers, temptation, battle and smoke, pleasure has to become equally forceful if it is to survive.
The closing pair moves decisively toward another state. “Moon Dream,” whose Japanese title invokes kachōfūgetsu—flowers, birds, wind and moon—introduces an old aesthetic vocabulary of attentiveness to nature and seasonal beauty. Mari Nishizono’s voice and guitar help give the piece a different emotional color, but the transition is not a retreat into traditional serenity. The electronic city remains audible. Kondo seems to be looking for the moon through its smoke, searching for an elemental image that has not yet been separated from human machinery.
“Beyond the Sorrow” ends the album in just over three minutes. Its brevity prevents it from becoming a monumental farewell, yet its placement makes it difficult not to hear as a threshold. The phrase does not deny sorrow; it asks what might exist on the other side of it. Kondo’s trumpet, capable throughout the record of sounding hostile or electronically armored, reveals its underlying vulnerability. Breath once again becomes the essential fact. After all the synthetic bass, amplified percussion and urban imagery, a human being still has to inhale before the next sound can occur.
The album is not without weaknesses. Its early-1990s production can feel emphatically period-specific, particularly when synthetic bass and programmed textures crowd the middle frequencies. Kondo’s English titles and vocal declarations occasionally approach slogan rather than fully developed language. The compact song format also limits the long-form collective improvisation that made IMA’s concerts so dangerous. Listeners drawn to Kondo through his work with Peter Brötzmann or Derek Bailey may find parts of the record overly constructed, while listeners approaching it as acid jazz may find it far too abrasive.
Those tensions are precisely what make Red City Smoke more than a period crossover exercise. It is the sound of a band that had spent nearly a decade refusing the divisions between free jazz, funk, punk, electronics, folk memory and popular spectacle. Instead of resolving those contradictions on its final album, IMA intensifies them. The first half confronts the city through science-fiction rhythm and overloaded communication; the second begins searching for joy, moonlight and a place beyond sorrow. Kondo would soon leave this band structure and take his electric trumpet into open landscapes. Red City Smoke captures the last moment before that departure, when the urban machine was still producing enough pressure, danger and beauty to demand one final answer.
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