Walter Rizzati / Claudio Simonetti - (2000) 1990 I Guerrieri Del Bronx + I Nuovi Barbari

 

Beat Records Company – CDCR 57  395.48MB FLAC

Beat Records’ 2000 CD pairing of 1990: I Guerrieri del Bronx and I Nuovi Barbari works like a late-night double feature reduced to seventy minutes of music. Both films were directed by Enzo G. Castellari in 1982, both construct imaginary futures from whatever American genre pictures were available to imitate, and both use music to create scale that their budgets could not always supply. Yet Walter Rizzati and Claudio Simonetti take noticeably different routes through the wreckage. Rizzati gives the Bronx a loose rock-band identity full of bass, guitar, drums, synthesizer and theatrical incident. Simonetti imagines the post-nuclear wasteland as an electronic system: colder, tighter and driven by repeating sequencer patterns. The CD’s thirty-two cues preserve that contrast rather than trying to make the two scores sound like one continuous work.
The release also corrected an imbalance in their histories. Rizzati’s 1990: I Guerrieri del Bronx had received an Italian soundtrack LP in 1982, although that edition contained only twelve selections. The 2000 disc expands it to eighteen, adding alternate and previously unavailable material. Simonetti’s I Nuovi Barbari had not received a proper contemporary album at all, despite containing some of his most immediately recognisable solo synthesizer writing. Beat’s pairing therefore joins one expanded score to one long-delayed premiere. The result is not merely economical programming. These films belong to the same moment in Italian exploitation cinema, when The Warriors, Escape from New York and Mad Max could be dismantled and recombined into new productions almost before their cultural impact had settled.
Rizzati’s section begins with “Bronx 1990,” a theme that gives Castellari’s gang territory more swagger than despair. Its bass-led rock pulse and electronic ornamentation suggest urban danger, but the music is too colourful to create convincing social collapse. That is precisely why it suits the film. This Bronx is not a realistic ruined borough; it is a collection of costumes, motorcycles, roller skates, weapons and tribal identities. Rizzati treats it as a stage. The principal theme supplies forward movement while leaving enough room for guitar and synthesizer gestures to give the gangs distinct silhouettes.
The score’s physical character is crucial. Rizzati does not present the future as an abstract electronic environment. Bass and drums continually return it to bodies moving through streets, riding motorcycles or preparing for combat. “Fire Knights,” “Hammer Boss” and “The Warriors” carry the blunt authority of entrance music. A character or gang appears, and the soundtrack tells us how much space they expect to occupy. The arrangements are simple, but they are not careless. Short riffs are chosen for immediate identification, then altered through tempo, instrumentation and density as alliances and threats change.
“Trash and Annie” introduces the melodic counterweight. Its softer material does not entirely escape the score’s synthetic surfaces, yet it creates a recognisable emotional space for the central pair. The second version included later on the disc makes the theme’s adaptability clearer. Rizzati can remove some of the rock weight, extend the melody or change the balance between rhythm and atmosphere without losing its identity. In a film populated by exaggerated gang types, this theme performs much of the work required to make Trash and Annie seem like individuals rather than moving pieces of production design.
The shorter suspense cues show how efficiently the score supports Castellari’s editing. “Bronx Suspense,” “N.Y. Suspense,” “Ring Mystery,” “Fear and Death” and “Still and Again” use modest electronic means but avoid collapsing into one generic drone. Pulses, held tones and small melodic fragments are deployed with enough variation to preserve tension across the album. The synthesizers possess the slightly unstable texture characteristic of their period; they do not simulate an orchestra or disappear into a polished ambient surface. Their artificiality belongs to the film’s artificial city.
“Radioprogramme” is one of the section’s eccentric pleasures, interrupting the action vocabulary with a parody of broadcast culture and disposable American sound. It reminds the listener that Italian genre scores were often willing to break tonal consistency for a joke, a source-music imitation or a few minutes of stylistic play. “Skaters Group” similarly embraces the absurdity of a roller-skating gang rather than trying to make it plausible through oppressive music. Rizzati understands that the film’s pleasures depend upon conviction, not realism. If the score treats every strange invention as worthy of its own musical identity, the viewer is encouraged to accept the entire improvised world.
The most excessive piece is “Learning to Die,” which stretches beyond the surrounding cues and invokes the massed, fatalistic force associated with Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna.” Choral drama, slow weight and rock amplification turn a low-budget gang movie into something approaching apocalyptic ceremony. It is shamelessly oversized, but its excess is functional. Castellari’s cinema thrives whenever music, photography and editing insist that an obviously limited production is witnessing myth. On the album, the piece becomes Rizzati’s grand central statement, temporarily replacing street-level rhythm with the expectation of sacrifice.
The additional cues after the material found on the old LP improve the score’s shape as a listening experience. “The Warriors,” “A Bar in the Bronx,” “Fear and Death,” “Still and Again” and “Slow Run” expand its range beyond the principal themes. “A Bar in the Bronx” allows the rhythm section more room and preserves the soundtrack’s connection to a lived-in social environment, however imaginary that environment may be. The concluding pieces gradually reduce the momentum, leaving Rizzati’s future suspended between melancholy and another approaching confrontation.
Simonetti’s “Nuke Is Over” then changes the air immediately. Where Rizzati’s Bronx feels assembled by gangs, Simonetti’s wasteland feels produced by technology. A bright, remarkably catchy synthesizer figure moves over precise percussion while electronic effects open a larger, emptier space around it. The title announces the aftermath of nuclear destruction, but the music is energised rather than mournful. Simonetti converts catastrophe into an electronic hook, establishing the contradiction that drives the score: the world has ended, yet the machinery remains exciting.
“The Survivors,” “Riding Killers” and “The Templars” develop this vocabulary through compact variations. Sequenced patterns provide motion while sharper keyboard attacks mark danger or pursuit. Simonetti’s experience in Goblin is audible, but I Nuovi Barbari is leaner than the group’s best-known horror scores. Progressive-rock elaboration is largely replaced by efficient synthesizer construction. Each cue establishes a pattern quickly, changes colour once or twice and exits before its limited material becomes exhausted.
This economy reflects the film’s production, but it also gives Simonetti’s half of the CD unusual coherence. Electronic effects, drum-machine precision and clipped melodic figures make the wasteland feel governed by a common technology. Electric guitar enters as abrasion rather than as the foundation of a band arrangement. Synth clusters signal violence, while the main pulses continue underneath as though brutality were simply another programmed function of the environment. Compared with Rizzati’s comparatively messy urban music, Simonetti’s future is clean-lined, hostile and depopulated.
Character pieces keep that system from becoming monotonous. “Scorpio” gives the hero a compact identity without resorting to a broad heroic anthem. “Alma the Amazon” softens the harmonic language, while “One and the Gang” restores group movement. The score’s romantic passages are brief and slightly fragile; they sound like temporary shelters inside the electronic landscape. Even the church-organ colour that appears in the program feels less like traditional spirituality than an artifact surviving after civilisation.
“The Medium” and “Nadir and Genius” move into stranger territory. Simonetti’s keyboard timbres can sound playful, sinister and faintly cheap within the same phrase, an ambiguity that suits Castellari’s collision of comic-book archetypes and violent spectacle. “Bows and Catapults” is particularly characteristic of the film’s imaginative logic: futuristic warriors use archaic weapons while synthesizers insist upon technological modernity. Rather than resolving the contradiction, the score makes it pleasurable.
“Scorpio’s Gang” and “Running to the Fight” push the rhythmic material toward the climax. Simonetti layers electronic movement without greatly increasing harmonic complexity, understanding that acceleration and timbral pressure are enough. The second version of “Nuke Is Over” returns the central idea in altered form before “Barbarian End” closes the program with a concise summary rather than a grand resolution. The wasteland continues; only this particular reel has stopped.
Placed together, the two scores reveal how broad the category of early-1980s Italian electronic action music actually was. Rizzati works outward from rock rhythm, character themes and source-music variety. Simonetti begins with synthesizer architecture and lets guitar, organ and melody enter as contrasting colours. Rizzati’s half is longer, more episodic and occasionally uneven, but its irregularity gives the Bronx personality. Simonetti’s half is more unified and immediately addictive, although its reliance on a narrow set of patterns can make the shorter cues feel like sketches around the main theme.
The sound retains the wiry, economical quality of the original recordings. Bass and percussion remain prominent, synthesizers have their period-specific edges, and neither score has been cosmetically transformed into modern retro-wave. That distinction matters. Later musicians have imitated this palette with cleaner equipment and greater low-frequency power, but these recordings capture the sounds while they were still tools of inexpensive futurism rather than nostalgic signs of “the eighties.”
1990: I Guerrieri del Bronx / I Nuovi Barbari succeeds because Beat Records recognised that the films’ shared director and production era mattered more than the composers’ differences. The CD allows those differences to become the attraction. Rizzati builds a ruined New York from rock riffs, gang themes and extravagant drama; Simonetti builds a nuclear desert from sequencers, electronic percussion and melodies that lodge in the brain almost instantly. Both scores lend conviction to futures visibly constructed from borrowed movies, limited resources and enormous enthusiasm. The films may be acts of imitation, but their music possesses identities strong enough to outlive the sources they were supposedly copying.

Whitney Houston - The Bodyguard (Japan)

Arista – BVCA-1401  491.02MB FLAC The Japanese edition of The Bodyguard contains thirteen tracks rather than the twelve found on the American CD, adding Kenny G’s instrumental “Waiting for You” without removing Alan Silvestri’s orchestral theme. That small difference produces the most complete version of the original 1992 soundtrack program: six Whitney Houston performances followed by seven selections from other artists and the film’s score. It also preserves the album’s central contradiction. The first half is so commanding and internally coherent that it feels like a concentrated Whitney Houston studio album; the second half returns it to the more miscellaneous form of a major-studio soundtrack compilation. The transition is abrupt, but it tells us exactly how The Bodyguard became larger than the film that generated it. The cover establishes Whitney as both singer and screen presence. She is shown in the protective embrace of Kevin Costner’s character, but the soundtrack itself reverses that relationship. Costner may be the bodyguard in the film, yet Houston’s voice carries the entire cultural weight of the project. Her six-song sequence occupies less than half the running time, but it defines the record so completely that the album is commonly treated as hers rather than as a various-artists soundtrack. That impression was encouraged by her role as co-executive producer and by the remarkable consistency of the material selected for Rachel Marron, the fictional star she portrays. “I Will Always Love You” begins with an exposed voice and no instrumental protection. The a cappella entrance is so familiar that its original risk can be difficult to recover. A soundtrack designed as an international blockbuster opens not with a beat, synthesizer, orchestra or recognisable instrumental hook, but with Houston alone, singing Dolly Parton’s farewell at a measured pace. Her first phrases are controlled rather than spectacular. She establishes the lyric as an act of separation before David Foster’s production begins expanding around her. When the drums, keyboards and saxophone finally arrive, the arrangement does not manufacture the song’s scale; it responds to scale already present in the voice. Houston’s performance is frequently remembered for its climactic key change and sustained power, but the quieter choices are equally important. She delays phrases, narrows certain vowels and allows breath to remain audible without presenting vulnerability as weakness. The final ascent therefore feels earned. It is not simply the moment when a famous singer demonstrates her range. It is the point at which restraint can no longer contain what the song has been saying. Foster’s polished production belongs unmistakably to early-1990s adult contemporary pop, but its clean surfaces leave enough open space for the vocal to retain physical presence. “I Have Nothing” follows with an even more purpose-built dramatic structure. Written by David Foster and Linda Thompson, it begins in intimate appeal and climbs steadily toward an ultimatum. The arrangement uses piano, synthesizers, strings and emphatic percussion to create a staircase for Houston’s voice. Every section is larger than the one before it, yet she prevents the song from becoming mechanical by changing the emotional pressure inside repeated lines. Her power is not merely volume. She can make a phrase sound conversational, wounded and authoritative within a few seconds, turning an otherwise highly engineered ballad into something that appears to be happening in real time. The shift into “I’m Every Woman” is crucial to the album’s pacing. After two songs built around romantic surrender and loss, Houston reclaims movement, community and public confidence. The Chaka Khan song is not treated as a museum piece. Narada Michael Walden’s production places it firmly in 1992 with programmed rhythm, bright keyboards and dance-floor momentum, while Houston approaches the lyric as celebration rather than competition with the original. Her spoken acknowledgement of Chaka near the end makes the lineage explicit. The performance also changes our understanding of the first two tracks: the woman capable of devastating romantic vulnerability is still the commanding entertainer at the centre of the room. “Run to You” returns to ballad form, but its character is softer and less declarative than “I Have Nothing.” Houston begins as if protecting the song from excessive force. The melody floats through its opening before widening into the chorus, where longing becomes physical motion. Because the soundtrack places three major ballads within its first four tracks, the production could easily have become repetitive. Instead, each occupies a distinct emotional position: farewell, demand and refuge. Houston’s control over scale is what separates them. She does not begin every song at the level where she intends to finish. “Queen of the Night” then breaks the polished romantic frame. Produced through the contemporary R&B team of L.A. Reid, Babyface and Daryl Simmons with Houston, it gives Rachel Marron an aggressive stage persona. Electric guitar, programmed drums and a harder vocal attack push the album toward pop-funk and rock spectacle. The song is less compositionally substantial than the principal ballads, but its function is different. It supplies friction. Houston growls, commands and uses rhythmic phrasing that the surrounding songs do not require, proving that the soundtrack’s image of her cannot be reduced to dignified suffering in evening gowns. “Jesus Loves Me” closes the Houston sequence by removing the fictional star’s armour. The song returns her to gospel, the musical language in which her voice was formed. Cedric Caldwell’s arrangement and the background vocals allow her to sing within a spiritual community rather than above an anonymous pop production. Her embellishments are expressive but not ornamental; each run grows from the lyric’s assurance. Placing the song after “Queen of the Night” is one of the album’s best decisions. Public glamour and private faith are not presented as incompatible versions of Houston. They are adjacent parts of the same instrument and identity. Had The Bodyguard ended there, it would be a short, exceptionally concentrated Whitney Houston album. Instead, “Even If My Heart Would Break,” performed by Kenny G and Aaron Neville, initiates the soundtrack’s second half. Neville’s fragile, instantly recognisable voice and Kenny G’s saxophone create an atmosphere of adult-contemporary tenderness, but the track inevitably feels smaller after Houston’s gospel conclusion. Its craftsmanship is evident, and its smoothness suits the film’s romantic world, yet it also reveals the difficulty facing every subsequent performer: the album has already delivered its emotional climax several times. Lisa Stansfield’s “Someday (I’m Coming Back)” survives the transition more successfully because it possesses rhythmic independence. Her voice is cooler and more conversational than Houston’s, and the production draws upon dance-pop and soul without attempting another monumental ballad. The song introduces a different kind of confidence, less theatrical and more grounded in groove. The S.O.U.L. S.Y.S.T.E.M.’s “It’s Gonna Be a Lovely Day” pushes farther toward club music, rebuilding Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day” around hip-hop-derived rhythm and an exuberant ensemble approach. These tracks remind us that The Bodyguard was assembled during a period when mainstream soundtracks were expected to serve several radio formats simultaneously. Curtis Stigers’s version of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” is the album’s strangest stylistic turn. Best known through Elvis Costello and the Attractions, the song is converted into polished roots-oriented pop. Its earnestness fits the soundtrack’s preference for large, direct emotion, though the arrangement reduces some of the tension contained in the lyric. It sounds less like an accusation made against a cynical world and more like a tasteful declaration prepared for the closing stretch of a studio film. The Japanese edition then supplies its distinguishing track. Kenny G’s “Waiting for You,” heard in the film but omitted from the American album, is a wordless romantic interlude built around his soprano saxophone. Listeners resistant to his immaculate tone will not discover a radically different musician here, but the cue improves the soundtrack’s architecture. It creates breathing room between the pop songs and Silvestri’s score, and it restores an element of the movie’s actual instrumental atmosphere. On the American CD, the soundtrack moves directly toward the orchestral theme; here, “Waiting for You” functions as a soft threshold. Alan Silvestri’s “Theme from The Bodyguard” is the only substantial representation of the dramatic score. Its orchestral suspense feels almost startling after so much vocal pop. Low strings, controlled percussion and a solemn central idea bring Frank Farmer’s professional isolation into the album. The theme reminds the listener that the film is not only a romance or a fictional concert vehicle but also a stalking thriller. One brief cue cannot fully represent Silvestri’s contribution, yet its placement gives the disc a needed shadow before the finale. “Trust in Me,” sung by Joe Cocker and Sass Jordan, closes the Japanese program with two rough-edged voices pushing against a broad rock-soul arrangement. Their duet is dramatically oversized and more weathered than anything preceding it. As an album ending, it is not as inevitable as Houston’s “Jesus Loves Me” would have been, but it completes the compilation’s movement from singular star vehicle to ensemble soundtrack. The record concludes by distributing emotional authority between two singers rather than returning to its central voice. The Japanese CD became especially appropriate to the album’s history because The Bodyguard achieved extraordinary success in Japan. It became the first album by a foreign artist certified for sales of two million copies there and ultimately sold approximately 2.8 million. The inclusion of “Waiting for You” may be a minor manufacturing distinction beside those numbers, but collectors are right to value it. The extra track makes the record correspond more closely to the music associated with the film and prevents Silvestri’s theme from bearing the instrumental burden alone. As a complete listen, The Bodyguard remains structurally lopsided. Houston’s six tracks possess a focus, vocal authority and dramatic progression that the various-artists portion cannot equal. The latter half sometimes resembles an Arista label showcase attached to a compact masterpiece. Yet that imbalance is more interesting than a perfectly uniform album might have been. It records the moment when a soundtrack designed to support a film was overtaken by one performer’s work. The Japanese edition does not solve the division, but by adding “Waiting for You,” it makes the second half more convincingly cinematic. What begins as Whitney Houston’s extraordinary six-song command performance gradually becomes a soundtrack again—and then, whenever the disc is replayed, her unaccompanied voice takes possession of it from the first second.

Keiichi Suzuki - 2003 - Zatoichi

Dreamusic Inc. – MUCD-1093  460.91MB FLAC

Keiichi Suzuki’s Zatoichi soundtrack begins by making manual labor musical. “A Road to a Post-Town” locks its pulse to farmers striking the earth, turning hoes, footsteps and bodily effort into parts of the score. The synchronization is playful but fundamental. Takeshi Kitano’s 2003 reinvention of the blind swordsman is structured by recurring collisions between period imagery and modern technique, abrupt violence and broad comedy, stillness and rhythm. Suzuki does not disguise those collisions beneath conventional samurai music. He builds a deliberately anachronistic electronic score around them, treating the village as a network of potential percussion and preparing the film for the tap-dance finale that eventually gathers its people into one communal beat.
The original Japanese CD contains fifteen tracks and runs sixty-six minutes. Its program is more expansive than a simple collection of short scene cues: two central pieces last more than ten minutes, three alternate mixes reveal how the material was shaped, and a brief trailer cue closes the disc. Released by Dreamusic in September 2003, it became Suzuki’s first score for Kitano and marked a conspicuous break from the director’s long association with Joe Hisaishi. Where Hisaishi often supplied Kitano’s images with lyrical piano, strings and melancholy melody, Suzuki works through hard electronic pulses, processed sound, exposed space and rhythmic interruption. The difference helps make Zatoichi feel less like a continuation of Kitano’s earlier cinema than a formal experiment conducted inside a popular genre.
“A Road to a Post-Town” establishes the method without sounding like a technical exercise. Suzuki originally wrote its theme for another scene, then cut it down and increased the tempo so that it would align with the workers shown at the beginning of the film. Synthetic rhythm and string writing move together, but neither completely absorbs the sound of labor. The tools retain their material identity: wood, metal, soil and coordinated bodies. Music does not merely accompany the action; the visible world appears to generate it. That relationship makes the opening unusually buoyant while introducing a question carried across the album: where does ordinary environmental noise end and composed rhythm begin?
The score’s electronic character is not meant to represent modernity intruding upon the nineteenth century in a simple joke. Suzuki initially pursued synthetic rhythm because he wanted a unique sound, but the finished music often feels surprisingly organic. Loops breathe, accents shift, and processed textures retain enough roughness to coexist with rain, footsteps and tools. The anachronism is pleasurable because it does not ask permission. Kitano’s Zatoichi already has bleached hair, computer-enhanced blood and a comic sensibility unconcerned with historical solemnity. Suzuki’s beats belong to that reconstructed world more convincingly than a reverent imitation of traditional music would have.
“Firewood-Chopping and a Farmer Who Wants to Be a Samurai” condenses the approach into just over two minutes. Its title joins an everyday action to an imaginary heroic identity, and the music occupies the space between them. Chopping establishes the beat while electronic additions exaggerate the farmer’s private drama. The cue is humorous without treating the character with contempt. Rhythm briefly allows an ordinary person to experience his work as performance, anticipating the finale’s transformation of rebuilding into theatre.
The darker cues remove much of that warmth. “Ginzo’s First Command,” “The Naruto-ya Rice Merchant Massacre” and “The Gambling House Massacre” replace communal motion with threat, empty space and sudden impact. Suzuki deliberately stripped elements away because metallic music risked competing with the sound of swords. That reduction gives the violence unusual clarity. Rather than filling every fight with accelerating percussion, he leaves openings in which a blade, body or movement can arrive with startling finality. Electronic bass and hard beats establish pressure, then withdraw before the action becomes acoustically crowded.
This restraint suits Kitano’s performance as Zatoichi. The character does not advertise his skill through constant heroic ceremony. He appears distracted, comic or physically unassuming until an encounter ends in a few impossibly fast movements. Suzuki avoids a large, continually announced hero theme for the same reason. His music works through atmosphere and timing, allowing Zatoichi’s competence to emerge as a rupture. “Zatoichi Showdown” is concise and synthetic, its rigid pulse carrying more tension than triumph. The final contest is not romanticised as an honourable meeting of warriors; it is another calculation completed with brutal efficiency.
The album’s two longest constructions contain its widest emotional range. “The Wasteland Massacre and the Reminiscence of Geisha” runs for more than twelve minutes, joining violence to memory rather than isolating them as separate soundtrack moods. The geisha siblings’ history introduces grief, disguise and revenge, and Suzuki responds with extended shifts in texture. Sparse electronics can give way to melodic fragments or heavier rhythmic material without creating the impression of a suite assembled from unrelated pieces. Memory seems to contaminate the present. Beauty, humiliation and violent purpose coexist inside the same musical space.
“A House on Fire and Massacres All Over” continues for nearly eleven minutes and is even more concerned with escalation. Its title accurately describes the film’s mounting disorder, but the music does not become an uninterrupted action block. Suzuki alternates momentum with suspension, using silence and reduced textures to preserve the shock of each new event. The cue’s length makes it one of the album’s strongest stand-alone pieces. Without the film, it behaves like an electronic narrative in which rhythmic structures repeatedly form, fracture and return with altered weight.
“Constructors” brings the score’s underlying idea into the foreground. Workmen rebuilding a house strike beams and operate tools in coordinated patterns, creating a percussion ensemble from practical activity. The scene could have been presented as a clever isolated gag, but its position within the larger rhythmic design makes it feel inevitable. The farmers, woodcutters and builders have been rehearsing the film’s ending without knowing it. Labor is not represented as anonymous background. Its repeated physical motions contain music before professional dancers arrive to reveal it.
“O-Kagura” introduces festival energy while retaining Suzuki’s modern processing. The title invokes sacred performance, but the cue does not attempt archaeological reconstruction. Traditional associations are filtered through contemporary rhythm and studio construction. That refusal of purity is central to both album and film. Kitano is not restoring Zatoichi to an untouched original state; he is taking a character already shaped by decades of movies and television and submitting him to another layer of reinvention.
“Festivo” completes the argument. The Stripes’ tap choreography converts wooden geta, ensemble movement and stage spectacle into an ecstatic finale. Saxophone and trumpet appear within the electronically treated arrangement, adding brightness without turning the music into a conventional big-band number. The dance gathers surviving characters, villagers and performers into a curtain call that temporarily dissolves narrative boundaries. Dead characters can return, generations can occupy the same stage, and historical realism becomes irrelevant. The community has spent the film producing fragments of rhythm through farming, rain and construction; “Festivo” finally lets those fragments recognise one another.
On the CD, the finale is not the absolute ending. Alternate mixes of “A Road to a Post-Town,” “Ginzo’s First Command” and “A House on Fire and Massacres All Over” follow it, changing emphasis and duration. The first makes the opening theme available outside its precise film synchronization, while the expanded “Ginzo’s First Command” allows its menace more room. The alternate “A House on Fire” compresses the long film construction into a different seven-minute arc. These versions are useful because Suzuki’s work depends so heavily on editing, tempo and the balance between musical and environmental sound. They reveal that a cue’s identity lies not only in its notes but in how its components are permitted to occupy time.
The alternates also make the album somewhat top-heavy. After “Festivo” delivers such a decisive release, another fifteen minutes of related material can feel supplementary rather than dramatic. Listeners approaching the disc as a self-contained electronic album may prefer to stop after the main program. Yet the repetition is justified as documentation of process, and the mixes differ enough to show how Suzuki’s ideas were adjusted around Kitano’s images.
Zatoichi is not consistently melodic, nor does it offer the sweep expected from a traditional sword-film score. Its long cues sometimes move through extended stretches of sparse atmosphere, and several shorter pieces function more effectively within the film than alone. Its achievement lies elsewhere. Suzuki constructs a complete sonic world from the relationship between rhythm and physical action. Synthetic beats do not sit on top of the period setting; they uncover patterns already present in walking, cutting, digging, hammering, gambling and fighting.
That makes the soundtrack inseparable from Kitano’s conception of entertainment. The film can be violent, mournful, ridiculous and formally precise without arranging those qualities into separate compartments. Suzuki responds with music capable of the same shifts. Darkness is interrupted by play, electronic severity by bodily noise, and private revenge by public celebration. The final dance is not a random flourish added to a samurai story. The entire score has been teaching the village—and the listener—to hear it coming.

David Arnold - 2012 - Godzilla 3xCD

 BSX Records – BSXCD 8916  965.30MB FLAC

Godzilla: The Ultimate Edition is almost comically large: three CDs, fifty-eight tracks and close to three hours devoted to David Arnold’s music for Roland Emmerich’s 1998 monster film. The proportions are appropriate. Arnold wrote for a huge orchestra, heavy percussion and choir, constructing a score capable of supplying weight, terror and majesty even when the creature on screen was moving with the speed of an oversized animal rather than the solemn force associated with Toho’s Godzilla. Released by BSX Records in 2012 as a limited edition of 3,000 copies, the set contains the complete chronological film score and alternates across its first two discs, then restores Arnold’s carefully assembled forty-nine-minute promotional album on the third. It is both an archive and a practical answer to its own excess: listeners can study nearly every surviving variation or choose the concise presentation Arnold originally intended.
That distinction matters because the music was badly represented when the film opened. The commercially successful 1998 soundtrack album concentrated on alternative rock, hip-hop and pop, including the Wallflowers, Puff Daddy with Jimmy Page, Jamiroquai, Rage Against the Machine, Foo Fighters and Green Day. Arnold received only two short selections near its end. Anyone who knew the film primarily through that disc could reasonably assume that its orchestral score was secondary. In reality, Godzilla was one of the largest works of Arnold’s early career, following Stargate, Independence Day and Tomorrow Never Dies during a period when he approached blockbuster scoring with extraordinary thematic confidence.
The first disc begins with “The Beginning,” establishing an atmosphere of nuclear unease before the monster is fully revealed. Low orchestral movement, dark choral writing and carefully spaced attacks transform images of French atomic testing into an origin ritual. Arnold’s principal Godzilla material does not merely announce size. Its descending weight and choral presence suggest something prehistoric being awakened by modern violence. The creature is an animal, but the score initially treats it as the consequence of a human transgression. This provides mythic gravity that the screenplay itself only intermittently sustains.
Arnold’s handling of suspense is equally important. Short cues such as “Tanker Gets It,” “Chernobyl,” “Footprint” and “The Boat Gets It” delay the full musical revelation while leaving evidence of impossible scale. Low strings, brass, tremors in the percussion and fragments of the central motif allow the monster to be heard before it is clearly seen. These early pieces are concise because they work through interruption: an ordinary environment is established, something enormous crosses it, and the cue ends before comprehension can catch up.
Once the action moves to New York, the score acquires several additional identities. A brisk heroic motif accompanies investigation and coordinated action, often taking on a military character. Nick Tatopoulos and Audrey receive gentler material, though Arnold wisely keeps their romantic theme secondary. The French operatives bring another shade of movement—capable, slightly mysterious and sometimes comic without becoming musical caricatures. These motifs are simple enough to survive inside densely orchestrated action cues, where brass, strings, percussion and electronic reinforcement are already competing for space.
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” demonstrates Arnold’s ability to move from suspense into spectacle without losing thematic clarity. The pile of fish is set as bait, anticipation builds, and the monster’s arrival opens into one of the score’s broadest statements. Arnold finds awe inside a sequence otherwise filled with military confusion and jokes. The theme briefly invites the listener to regard Godzilla not only as a target but as an astonishing living presence. This sympathetic dimension becomes increasingly important because the film’s creature is not malicious. It searches for food, nesting space and survival while the armed response destroys much of the city around it.
The helicopter chase that follows is pure large-scale Arnold. Rapid string figures, emphatic brass and layered percussion make the cue surge forward, but the action is shaped by recurring motifs rather than rhythmic noise alone. His orchestration is dense without becoming opaque. Individual lines remain perceptible inside the mass, and changes in harmony tell us when pursuit becomes danger or apparent victory becomes another failure. Nicholas Dodd’s conducting and close involvement with Arnold’s orchestral work help give the performance its sharp articulation.
The first disc also reveals how much connective writing disappeared behind the film’s pace. Brief cues for television offices, military preparation, scientific discovery and Nick’s damaged relationship with Audrey make the complete program more fragmented than a conventional album, but they expose the score’s architecture. Arnold is constantly moving between four scales: the individual characters, the investigation, the military operation and the monster. A few notes can shift the perspective from personal embarrassment to national emergency. Heard chronologically, these transitions show how carefully the music keeps an unwieldy production intelligible.
Disc two begins with the search beneath Madison Square Garden and the discovery of Godzilla’s offspring. The score changes genre accordingly. Heavy monster writing gives way to quick, nervous movement that openly acknowledges the film’s debt to Jurassic Park. “The Babies,” “Baby ‘Zilla Haunts Audrey” and the surrounding cues use scampering figures, sudden accents and compressed orchestral attacks to turn the hatchlings into a swarm rather than miniature versions of the parent creature. Arnold preserves his thematic language while making the music faster, lighter and more predatory.
“Nick’s Big Speech/The Garden Gets It” marks the score’s most emphatic disaster climax. The orchestra and choir elevate the destruction of Madison Square Garden beyond the mechanics of an explosion, while the earlier investigation and heroic material gives the human action a coherent line through the chaos. The scale can become exhausting when the complete score is heard without interruption, but Arnold’s sincerity is difficult to resist. He does not write as if embarrassed by the film or protect himself with irony. Every escape, revelation and detonation receives committed dramatic treatment.
The final pursuit restores the adult Godzilla theme with a more tragic weight. “He’s Back!/Taxi Chase & Clue” converts Manhattan into a fast-moving maze, while “Big G Goes to Monster Heaven” gives the creature’s death an emotional dignity greater than the film has fully prepared. Arnold slows the action vocabulary and lets the theme mourn what it previously made terrifying. The music recognises that the monster was created, hunted and killed for obeying its biological drives. Whatever one thinks of Emmerich’s interpretation of Godzilla, Arnold’s conclusion understands the potential pathos of the creature.
The chronological score ends with “The End,” after which the second disc supplies alternates and special material. Versions without choir or with different edits show how strongly vocal weight affects the score’s mythic dimension. Alternate treatments of “The Boat Gets It,” “Evacuation,” the Madison Square Garden destruction and Godzilla’s death reveal the practical process of fitting large musical structures to continually revised images. A solo-piano rendering strips the theme to its melodic skeleton, demonstrating that its identity does not depend entirely on orchestral mass. “Gojira,” prepared as an album version, then points toward the third disc.
That final CD may be the set’s most useful component. It reproduces the fifteen-track score album assembled in 1998 but circulated only as a promotional release. Arnold combines and retitles cues into a clean dramatic sequence: “Gojira Opening Titles,” “Dawn of the Species,” “Leaving Manhattan,” “Subterranea,” “The Babies,” “Final Encounter,” “Brooklyn Bridge” and “Finale.” At forty-nine minutes, it removes repetitions, micro-cues and much of the film-editing debris while preserving every major theme and set piece. The program demonstrates that Arnold did not merely compose a mass of functional material; he understood how it could be reshaped into a satisfying album.
The difference between the two experiences is revealing. Across the first two discs, the score feels like a complex machine serving a long film, changing direction whenever story, comedy, romance or visual effects demand it. On disc three, those same materials form an orchestral monster narrative with a clear beginning, expansion, pursuit and death. The promotional program is likely what should have been commercially issued in 1998 alongside—or instead of allowing Arnold to be nearly erased by—the song compilation.
The sound throughout is expansive and detailed. Brass has the required force without swallowing the strings, percussion reaches deep without turning every climax into undifferentiated impact, and the choir retains definition inside the orchestral weight. Some synthesizer textures and rhythmic devices clearly belong to late-1990s action scoring, but the performance’s physical scale prevents the music from feeling like a period curiosity. Arnold’s themes remain strong enough to survive alternate mixes, short dramatic fragments and repeated action settings.
The Ultimate Edition inevitably contains too much music for casual listening. Consecutive suspense cues and multiple versions can produce fatigue, while the romantic and comic passages do not possess the distinction of the monster material. But the set solves that problem by including its own ideal abridgement. The first two discs document; the third performs. Together they show how a blockbuster score exists simultaneously as recording sessions, film construction and listening album.
Godzilla has spent decades beneath the reputation of the movie it accompanied. Arnold’s work deserves separation from that argument. He gave the creature grandeur, the investigation momentum, the military action coherence and the ending unexpected sorrow. The 2012 set finally presents the full dimensions of that achievement. The film insisted that size was its primary attraction; this edition demonstrates that its music was genuinely as large as advertised.

Toshinori Kondo & IMA – 1984 – 大変 = Taihen

 

Polydor – 3113-33  226.54MB FLAC

Toshinori Kondo & IMA’s Taihen begins with a proposition that was still genuinely unruly in 1984: dance music need not be polite, free improvisation need not reject rhythm, and Japanese musical traditions need not be preserved behind glass. Across six substantial pieces, Kondo brings these supposedly incompatible impulses into the same crowded room. Bass, drums and percussion establish physical grooves; guitars scratch, stab and buckle around them; voices appear as chants, exclamations and theatrical interruptions; and Kondo’s trumpet behaves less like a featured solo instrument than a streak of hot metal passing through the entire construction. The album does not smooth these elements into tasteful “fusion.” It allows them to jostle, interfere and occasionally threaten to pull the music apart.
The title’s ambiguity suits the record. Taihen can indicate trouble, severity, an extraordinary situation or a great change, depending on its context and delivery. All those possibilities hover over the opening track. The rhythm section locks into a forceful, almost dance-floor-ready pattern, but its apparent stability is continually disturbed. Taizo Sakai, Reck and Yoshinori Teramae supply guitars that have little interest in conventional jazz accompaniment. Their clipped figures and abrasive textures draw as much from funk and no wave as from improvisation. Above them, Kondo does not offer a cleanly developed melodic statement. His trumpet arrives in cries, smears and sharply illuminated fragments, cutting across the beat instead of riding comfortably upon it.
This was the first year of IMA, the ensemble through which Kondo redirected the energy of his earlier free-improvising work into a louder and more publicly accessible form. Accessibility, however, did not mean domestication. Rodney Drummer’s electric bass and Cecil Monroe’s drums give the music weight and propulsion, while Kiyohiko Senba’s percussion complicates their patterns from within. There is always something to grasp—a bass figure, a backbeat, a repeated guitar phrase—but the details refuse to stay obediently in place. The result is dance music imagined as an unstable social event: bodies moving together while contradictory signals pass between them.
“The Day After” alters the balance without abandoning the rhythmic foundation. Its title suggests aftermath, and the performance has the strained spaciousness of a landscape being inspected after some unnamed disturbance. Instead of filling every available space, the musicians make the gaps feel charged. Bass and percussion continue to define the ground, while trumpet and guitar appear like nervous transmissions from different points in the mix. Kondo’s tone is especially effective here because it can sound both human and nearly electronic. He bends and compresses notes until they resemble alarms, animal calls or fragments of speech, yet a vulnerable breath remains audible inside the metallic surface.
“Takao Blue” closes the first side by invoking the blues without settling into a familiar blues performance. The title offers an emotional and musical reference point, but Kondo and IMA treat the form as material to be displaced. The guitars worry at compact figures, the bass pushes forward, and the trumpet alternately comments on and attacks the surrounding activity. What matters is not harmonic correctness but the friction between recognition and estrangement. Just as a groove becomes secure, a vocal noise, instrumental outburst or change in emphasis makes it feel newly precarious. The piece demonstrates how carefully constructed the album’s apparent disorder actually is.
The second side turns more explicitly toward Japanese ceremonial and folk materials. “Hana Matsuri (A Song for Buddha)” refers to the flower festival celebrating the Buddha’s birth, but the group does not offer a reverent reconstruction. Percussion, voices and trumpet convert ceremony into contemporary performance, lively enough to suggest a street procession but fractured enough to prevent picturesque nostalgia. Fusako Fujimoto and Rica Tanaka are important to the album’s character because their voices are not simply decorative color. Along with Kondo’s own vocal contributions, they expand the record’s vocabulary of cries, syllables and collective gestures. Voice becomes another rhythmic and dramatic element.
“Oiwake” likewise draws upon a Japanese folk-song tradition, historically connected with the calls and songs of packhorse drivers. IMA retains the sense of a melody traveling across distance, but places it inside a distinctly 1980s electric environment. The contrast is not presented as a clash between an authentic past and a corrupted present. Kondo seems more interested in proving that tradition was never motionless. A folk melody survives because it can be sung, stretched, distorted and carried into another setting. Here it moves through electric bass, terse guitar and a production style that emphasizes separation, impact and sudden changes in perspective.
The concluding “Ohara Shosuke,” also listed as “Shosuke-San,” is the album’s most openly playful synthesis. Its folk association gives the musicians a recognizable cultural figure to circle, yet the performance is anything but quaint. Repetition becomes mischievous and slightly obsessive. Voices prod the rhythm onward, the band exaggerates its turns, and Kondo responds with phrases that can sound celebratory one moment and sarcastic the next. At more than seven minutes, the track lingers inside its vamp long enough for pleasure to become strangeness. It ends the record not with resolution but with the sensation of a public festivity continuing beyond the edge of the vinyl.
Bill Laswell’s credited tape work is integral to Taihen, even though this is unmistakably Kondo’s record. Laswell’s presence is felt less as a signature imposed on the musicians than as an understanding that the recording studio can actively destabilize a band. Events arrive with hard edges; instrumental layers sometimes feel deliberately detached from one another; and brief incursions of voice or sound can redirect an entire passage. Seigen Ono’s mix gives the rhythm section sufficient punch for the album’s dance impulse while preserving the abrasive individuality of the guitars and trumpet. It is a dense record, but rarely a muddy one.
Some aspects of Taihen unmistakably belong to its decade. The drum sound can be rigid, the bass emphatically forward, and certain vocal gestures possess the exaggerated theatricality common to adventurous 1980s studio records. Listeners seeking the organic looseness of Kondo’s earlier improvisational encounters may find parts of it too programmatic. Conversely, listeners attracted by its funk and dance elements may be unsettled by Kondo’s refusal to provide tidy themes or conventionally gratifying solos. Several pieces sustain their vamps long enough to become awkward. Yet this awkwardness is part of the design: the album’s identity lies in the refusal of any one component to absorb all the others.
Kondo’s great achievement is that he never treats groove as a compromise. Rhythm does not restrain the improvisation; it gives the trumpet something solid to scrape against. Folk material does not soften the experimental procedures; it introduces collective memory into their field of conflict. Studio processing does not conceal the musicians’ physical presence; it intensifies their gestures. Even at its most crowded, Taihen retains the feeling of people testing how much pressure a musical structure can withstand.
Four decades later, the album still sounds like a declaration of method. Kondo would continue exploring amplified trumpet, global rhythm and electronic space, but Taihen catches the IMA idea at the moment of ignition. It is exuberant, ungainly, funny, aggressive and unexpectedly ceremonial. Its six pieces do not establish a perfected style so much as demonstrate the productive possibilities of collision. Whether the title is heard as “serious trouble” or “great change,” the answer contained in the grooves is the same: movement begins when stable categories become impossible to maintain.

Kondo Toshinori - 2002 - Nerve Tripper

 

DIW – DIW-453  357.64MB FLAC

Nerve Tripper reduces Toshinori Kondo’s music to a particularly volatile equation: electric trumpet, programmed sound and DJ Sahib’s turntables. Recorded between January 2000 and April 2001 and released by DIW in December 2002, it contains none of the conventional ensemble machinery that had powered Kondo’s IMA recordings. There is no drummer holding the center, no bassist marking out harmonic ground and no guitar to answer the trumpet. Instead, eight electronic environments develop through loops, sampled voices, beats and low-frequency pulses. Kondo must either find a path through these synthetic spaces or tear one open. He usually does both.
The album belongs to the electronic direction Kondo had been developing for years, but it does not feel like an academic electroacoustic exercise. Rhythm remains essential. Even when the music becomes spacious or contemplative, something is moving underneath: a muted breakbeat, a rotating bass pattern, a hand-drum simulation or an indistinct pulse that is felt before it is clearly heard. DJ Sahib’s turntables contribute more than scratches or recognizable quotations. They function as a source of displaced voices, fleeting textures and rhythmic debris. Kondo’s programming then extends this vocabulary into environments that can be funky, psychedelic, ominous or strangely devotional.
“Open the Gate” is an appropriate title for the first piece because the album frequently behaves like an initiation. Electronic layers gather gradually, producing the sensation of approaching an unfamiliar interior rather than entering a normal song. Kondo’s trumpet does not immediately claim authority over this landscape. It materializes within it, its attacks lengthened or bent until the instrument seems partly absorbed by the circuitry. The natural grain of breath and embouchure remains audible, however, creating the central tension of Nerve Tripper: a recognizably human voice is repeatedly transformed without ever being completely erased.
Kondo’s use of electric trumpet inevitably invites comparison with Miles Davis, especially the dark rhythmic density of Davis’s 1970s music. Kondo shares Davis’s fascination with repetition, studio manipulation and the ability of a sustained trumpet note to reorganize everything around it. Yet Nerve Tripper is not an attempt to reproduce On the Corner with contemporary equipment. Kondo’s phrasing is more openly abrasive and less concerned with cool authority. Notes rupture, smear and sometimes dissolve into electronic residue. Where Davis could dominate a groove through restraint, Kondo frequently sounds as if he is testing how much voltage a phrase can absorb before its identity collapses.
“Lonely Way” makes solitude feel less like peaceful isolation than continuous movement through an uninhabited space. The electronic rhythm suggests forward motion, but no destination becomes apparent. Kondo responds with phrases that hover between melody and signal. His longer tones bring momentary emotional clarity, only for processing and surrounding noise to pull them back into uncertainty. That relationship between lyricism and disruption is one of the album’s strengths. Kondo can produce a beautifully exposed line, but he rarely permits beauty to remain uncontested. The environment bends around it, scratches its surface or replaces it with an echo.
“Insane Moon Moves Innocent Man” has the most evocative title on the disc, and its unstable construction lives up to it. Rhythm and atmosphere appear to exert an external force upon the performer, as if the “innocent man” were being moved by patterns he cannot control. The track’s psychedelic character does not depend on lushness. Instead, repetition alters the listener’s perception of scale and duration. Small changes become disproportionately significant: a voice entering at the edge of the sound field, a bass pulse growing heavier, or a trumpet cry being caught and extended beyond the breath that produced it.
“Savage Satellite” offers the album’s mechanical side in concentrated form. The title joins primitive aggression to orbiting technology, an opposition that could describe Kondo’s entire electric language. His trumpet retains the bodily violence of lungs forcing air through metal, while the electronics detach that sound from ordinary physical limits. A note can hang, multiply or return as an alien version of itself. DJ Sahib’s interventions add to the sense of intercepted transmissions. Rather than constructing a smooth futuristic surface, the piece imagines technology as battered, overloaded and full of ghosts.
The first half of Nerve Tripper is generally more immediate, while “Where You Appear” begins a passage into slower and more internally focused music. Kondo leaves greater room around his gestures, and the distinction between foreground and background becomes uncertain. Sounds do not always announce themselves as events; some seem to have been present for minutes before the ear notices them. The piece’s title introduces the possibility of another person, memory or spiritual presence appearing inside the electronic field. Kondo’s trumpet becomes less combative here, although its vulnerability makes the surrounding space feel no less strange.
“Dream Vibrates with Space” is the album’s deepest immersion. Tribal-sounding rhythms move with unhurried persistence, voices drift through the mix, and bursts of processed sound briefly illuminate an otherwise nocturnal environment. Kondo plays as though measuring the dimensions of that environment. His phrases do not simply decorate the rhythm; they reveal hidden depth behind it. The track is relaxing in the limited sense that it does not hurry, but it is never passive ambient music. Its calm contains apprehension. Every sustained tone seems capable of uncovering something concealed beneath the groove.
The transition into “Attaining the Esoteric Life” is especially effective. Sharper percussion and a heavy, heartbeat-like bass figure make the journey more physical, while fragments of sound continue to pass through the music like objects carried by a dark current. The spiritual language of the title could have produced vague New Age solemnity, but Kondo’s playing prevents that. His trumpet remains too cracked, urgent and materially present. Enlightenment, if the title is taken seriously, is not represented as escape from the body. It is approached through pressure, repetition, breath and nervous sensation.
“Eternal Quest” concludes the album without providing a simple revelation. Its position suggests arrival, yet the word “quest” keeps the process open. This resistance to resolution is fundamental to Kondo’s music. He is less interested in presenting a stable spiritual destination than in sustaining the search between physical and electronic states. The trumpet can sound ancient and futuristic within the same phrase. A programmed rhythm can become ritualistic through repetition, while a turntable fragment can acquire the emotional force of a half-remembered voice.
The album’s limitations are closely connected to its methods. Some programmed textures bear the recognizable stamp of turn-of-the-century electronic production, and the extended repetition can feel static when Kondo withdraws for too long. Listeners accustomed to the spontaneous interaction of his work with Peter Brötzmann, William Parker or Hamid Drake may miss the danger created by independent musicians responding in real time. Here, Kondo and DJ Sahib construct danger largely through accumulation, processing and contrast. That approach is sometimes less surprising, but it allows for a different kind of concentration.
Nerve Tripper ultimately succeeds because it does not use electronics merely to modernize jazz. It treats them as a new nervous system for the trumpet. Beats become involuntary contractions, samples resemble fragments of memory, and processed tones extend Kondo’s breath into spaces his body could not occupy alone. The music is funky without becoming a party record, meditative without becoming soothing and psychedelic without depending on decorative excess. It documents Kondo at his most solitary and technologically immersed, still pursuing the same elemental concern that connects his wildly different projects: how one breath, forced through metal, can confront an entire world of sound.

Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1985 - Metal Position

 

Polydor – H33P 20026  197.40MB FLAC

On Metal Position, Toshinori Kondo & IMA sound as though they have constructed a nightclub inside a steelworks. The album’s rhythms are emphatic and bodily, but nearly every surface is hard, compressed or electrically charged. Released by Polydor in 1985, it follows the more sprawling cultural collisions of Taihen with a tighter eight-piece program. The earlier record often sounded like several musical traditions entering the studio at once; Metal Position turns that encounter into a coherent band language. Funk bass, disco momentum, industrial percussion, synthesizers and electric guitars form a dense chassis around Kondo’s trumpet. The music is accessible enough to move to, but much too abrasive to become comfortable.
IMA’s revised personnel helps explain the change. Kondo plays electric trumpet, voice, speaker and synthetic percussion. Reck contributes electric guitar, an Oberheim DX drum machine, percussion, voice and bass on “Cerezo Rosa,” while Taizo Sakai supplies a second electric guitar. Haruo Togashi moves among synthesizer, piano, soprano saxophone and voice. Rodney Drummer remains on electric bass for most of the record, but Hideo Yamaki replaces Cecil Monroe behind the drums, combining an acoustic Sonor kit with Simmons electronic drums. The group can therefore sound simultaneously performed and programmed: human accents land inside rigid patterns, while electronic percussion acquires the instability of live interaction.
“Night Drive” announces the method immediately. Its forward-leaning disco beat creates a strong sensation of acceleration, and the sharply compressed bass sounds designed to cut through an urban environment of engines, illuminated signs and reflected glass. The synthesizer voicings suggest the electric bands of Miles Davis, but Kondo does not imitate Davis’s regal economy. His trumpet is more corrosive. Phrases flare over the rhythm, twist out of shape and leave electronic residue behind them. The track feels less like music accompanying a drive than a simulation of velocity itself, with every instrument contributing to the pressure of continuous movement.
Kondo’s trumpet remains the decisive sound. Effects do not merely enlarge its tone; they destabilize its identity. A blast may begin as brass and end as feedback, siren or vocalized noise. His short attacks can resemble metallic fragments thrown against the beat, while longer notes create bright horizontal streaks across the densely patterned rhythm section. Yet the processing never eliminates the physical labor of playing. Breath, strain and the moment of attack remain palpable. That combination of bodily force and electronic mutation gives Metal Position its distinctive emotional tension: the human performer is not replaced by the machine but is continually testing himself against it.
“Cerezo Rosa” is the album’s most mischievous transformation. Better known internationally as “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” the composition carries associations with Latin dance orchestras and mid-century popular entertainment. IMA treats that familiarity as raw material. Reck takes over the electric-bass role, and the tune is pulled into a synthetic rhythmic setting whose hard edges make its melodic charm sound almost artificial. Kondo can acknowledge the tune and mock its sweetness in the same gesture. Rather than presenting an ironic lounge cover, the group discovers that an old popular melody can survive distortion, displacement and an entirely different conception of physical rhythm.
“Metalic Bamboo,” with the original title spelling, condenses the album’s governing contradiction into one memorable image. Bamboo bends, breathes and grows; metal is manufactured, cold and resistant. IMA’s music occupies the point at which those qualities exchange characteristics. Yamaki’s acoustic and Simmons drums blur the distinction between impact and electronic trigger, while Togashi’s keyboards provide color without softening the arrangement. Guitar parts are clipped into percussive shapes instead of forming a conventional rock wall. Kondo moves through this framework like an unstable signal, alternately joining the pattern and cutting across it. The track is disciplined, but its discipline creates pressure rather than polish.
“Black Dance” closes the first side with the group’s rhythm-centered aesthetic at its most direct. The title may imply darkness, cultural memory or simply a dance conducted outside the glare of pop normality; the music resists reducing it to one meaning. Rodney Drummer’s bass gives the piece a muscular center, but the surrounding parts keep changing its apparent weight. Electronic drum tones produce abrupt, geometrical accents, while guitars insert flashes of abrasion. Kondo understands that repetition becomes hypnotic only when the listener senses the possibility of rupture. His entrance can change an established groove from pleasurable to threatening without requiring the rhythm itself to stop.
The second side begins with “We Know Smart,” a title whose awkward English resembles a slogan translated by a malfunctioning advertising system. The music has a corresponding mixture of confidence and absurdity. Voices, synthetic accents and clipped instrumental figures create a busy surface in which knowingness itself seems suspect. IMA was capable of entering Japan’s commercial culture without surrendering the disruptive habits of the avant-garde. The band could use the attractive force of fashion, technology and dance music while exposing their nervousness. What initially resembles stylish 1980s production begins to sound stranger as its repetitions accumulate.
“Tea Girl” makes that tension more theatrical. Its compact structure and vocal elements suggest pop, but the group refuses to provide a stable lead singer or an uncomplicated chorus. Voice is treated as gesture, rhythm and character, operating beside the trumpet rather than explaining the music. Kondo’s vocal presence has a deliberately rough quality that prevents the record’s technological precision from becoming anonymous. The instrumental backing may be sharply organized, but human sounds keep leaking through its seams. This is one reason the album has aged more interestingly than many contemporary jazz-funk productions: its period equipment is obvious, yet it is used to cultivate eccentricity rather than demonstrate sophistication.
“Tricky Dicky Fa Fa Fa” is even more overtly comic. The title appears to point toward Richard Nixon’s old nickname, but whatever political joke may be embedded in it, the piece functions through caricature and repetition. The “fa fa fa” phrase reduces language to a stammering hook, while the band assembles a kind of mechanical satire around it. Kondo’s ability to move between seriousness and mockery is crucial. His amplified trumpet can suggest spiritual urgency, but he is equally willing to make it squawk, sneer and interrupt. Here, virtuosity becomes a form of misbehavior rather than a demand for admiration.
“Kaze,” meaning “wind,” ends the album in just under three minutes. After the record’s metallic density, the title promises air and movement, but the conclusion does not abandon the electronic world that preceded it. Instead, it offers a compressed final perspective on Kondo’s central concern: breath transformed by technology. Wind becomes trumpet tone; trumpet tone becomes electrical signal; the signal enters a rhythmic structure and returns altered. The brevity of the piece is important. Metal Position does not conclude with a grand summation. It releases its accumulated pressure in a final gust.
The record’s most dated qualities are also inseparable from its personality. Simmons drums, heavily processed bass and abrupt synthesizer timbres place it unmistakably in the middle of the 1980s. Some listeners may find the drum sounds brittle, while those approaching Kondo through his free-improvised work may consider the arrangements restrictive. The grooves occasionally repeat ideas after their initial impact has registered, and the period’s fascination with synthetic surfaces can make emotional distinctions harder to perceive. Nevertheless, IMA never mistakes technical novelty for substance. The musicians continually disturb their own structures through tone, timing and unexpected shifts of emphasis.
Metal Position is neither jazz-rock fusion in the polished sense nor an avant-garde ensemble temporarily borrowing a beat. Rhythm is the laboratory in which Kondo conducts his experiments. The tighter construction gives his trumpet greater resistance, and therefore something more substantial to damage. Compared with Taihen, the album is less ceremonial, less expansive and more decisively urban. Its world is made of night roads, machines, advertising fragments, altered popular melodies and bodies moving under electronic pressure. IMA’s achievement was to make those materials feel exhilarating without pretending they were benign. The music takes its position inside modernity’s metal frame—and then spends forty minutes bending it.

Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1989 - Human Market

 

Jaro Medien – JARO 4146  256.63MB FLAC

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.

Kondo Toshinori & IMA - 1989 - Kamikaze Blow

 

Alfa – 25A2-15  321.76MB FLAC

Kamikaze Blow is where the elaborate studio architecture of Toshinori Kondo & IMA is forced to survive contact with a stage. Recorded in Sydney at Rhinoceros Studios and the KAKADU Club, this 1989 “Pan-Pacific Live” album contains six performances drawn from the band’s late-1980s repertoire. Three pieces—“Last Lost,” “Banana Plantation” and “96”—occupy the first half, while “Porto Novo” and “Y・U” expand to nearly ten and twelve minutes respectively. The program lasts roughly forty-six minutes, but it feels larger because IMA treats every composition as material to be stretched, battered and reorganized in public.
The group is the central late-period IMA unit: Kondo on electric trumpet and vocals, Haruo Togashi on keyboards and backing vocals, Hideo Yamaki on drums, and Reck and Taizo Sakai exchanging electric-guitar and bass duties. On most of the album, Sakai plays bass while Reck handles guitar; for “Banana Plantation” and “Y・U,” they switch positions. That flexibility is more than a personnel curiosity. Guitar and bass do not behave as fixed instrumental roles in this band. Either can provide mass, rhythmic punctuation or destabilizing texture, and the live setting makes those exchanges feel especially physical.
“Yami,” meaning darkness, begins as an entrance into hostile territory. Rather than easing the audience into the set with a compact statement, IMA establishes tension immediately. Togashi’s keyboards create an artificial horizon against which Yamaki places hard, decisive drum accents. Electric guitar works less as harmonic accompaniment than as a collection of cuts and sparks. Kondo’s trumpet arrives like an emergency transmission: distorted, bright and unstable, retaining the bodily violence of breath even as amplification pushes it toward feedback. His voice adds another damaged signal, halfway between a command, a chant and an involuntary cry.
The live sound is rougher than the carefully separated surfaces of Human Market. That loss of studio precision is the album’s advantage. Instruments occupy the same congested air, and the edges of individual gestures blur whenever the ensemble increases its volume. Kondo can no longer rely on editing or spatial placement to make an entrance dramatic. He must physically project through Yamaki’s drums and the amplified rhythm section. His response is not simply to play louder. He changes the length, density and angle of his phrases, using short bursts to puncture the groove and sustained notes to make the entire band seem to bend around him.
“Last Lost” grows from the compact studio piece into a performance lasting more than seven minutes. On Human Market, its broken title accompanied a rhythm that seemed uncertain of its own footing. Here that uncertainty becomes combative. Yamaki gives the piece momentum without converting it into a regular funk workout. His beat can lock down suddenly and then fracture under asymmetrical accents. Reck’s guitar throws abrasive shapes into the openings, while Sakai’s bass provides enough continuity to keep the performance moving forward. Kondo sounds less like a solitary figure trapped inside an urban system than a provocateur actively challenging the system’s limits.
The difference clarifies IMA’s relationship to improvisation. These musicians do not abandon composition and begin playing “free” in the usual sense. Themes, riffs and rhythmic identities remain audible, but their proportions are no longer fixed. A groove can be prolonged until it becomes hypnotic, a transition can turn into a confrontation, and an instrumental break can threaten to redirect the whole performance. The tunes operate as containers under pressure. What matters is not whether the band escapes them, but how visibly their walls begin to flex.
“Banana Plantation” is one of the album’s most muscular performances. Reck moves to electric bass and Sakai to guitar, changing the rhythm section’s internal balance. The title still carries the double image heard on Human Market: tropical color on the surface, commodity production and labor underneath. Live, the piece emphasizes the physical side of that contradiction. The beat is enticing, but it also feels coercive, driving the players onward with little room for rest. Kondo rides it, resists it and occasionally appears to shout against it. Pleasure and aggression become impossible to separate.
“96” is the set’s shortest piece and its most concentrated blow. Its numerical title resists interpretation, directing attention toward the direct impact of the performance. The arrangement has no need for a large narrative arc. Rhythm, keyboard color, guitar abrasion and trumpet attack are compressed into a brief, forceful statement. Its placement is effective: after the expanded revisions of familiar Human Market material, “96” resets the album’s scale before the two long closing performances. It also demonstrates that IMA’s power did not depend entirely upon duration. The band could create pressure almost instantly.
At nearly ten minutes, “Porto Novo” opens a wider field. The title points toward the capital of Benin, but the music should not be reduced to a claim of geographical authenticity. IMA’s “Pan-Pacific” concept is less a survey of identifiable regional styles than an assertion that musical circulation can ignore conventional boundaries. Funk rhythm, Japanese electric experimentation, rock volume and Kondo’s history in European free improvisation coexist without being tidily reconciled. The live performance turns that hybridity into motion. Sections emerge from one another through changes in density rather than polite thematic transitions.
Yamaki is indispensable throughout the album, and “Porto Novo” gives his playing room to command attention. His drums are both an anchor and an engine of disruption. He can produce a heavy, almost mechanical pulse while inserting details that make the meter feel less secure than it first appears. Togashi’s keyboards widen the environment around him, sometimes reinforcing the rhythmic architecture and sometimes hovering above it like artificial weather. Against this backdrop, Kondo’s trumpet assumes multiple roles: lead voice, percussion instrument, alarm and source of pure electrical texture.
“Y・U” is the culmination. Lasting almost twelve minutes, it transforms what might be read phonetically as “why you” into an extended interrogation. Reck again takes bass while Sakai plays guitar, and the changed configuration gives the music a blunt, elastic foundation. IMA does not rush toward a climax. The musicians accumulate intensity through repetition, instrumental abrasion and Kondo’s increasingly exposed vocal-trumpet gestures. When his voice enters, it does not explain the piece; it intensifies its uncertainty. Language breaks down into tone, and tone becomes inseparable from physical effort.
The title Kamikaze Blow is intentionally provocative. “Kamikaze” brings unavoidable historical associations with destructive sacrifice, while “blow” refers at once to impact, breath and the act of playing a wind instrument. Kondo uses the phrase as an image of total commitment, but the music is more complex than a fantasy of reckless self-destruction. The band’s abandon depends upon control. Yamaki’s precision, the instrumental exchanges between Reck and Sakai, and Togashi’s ability to shape electronic space allow Kondo to sound as if he is approaching the point of collapse without the ensemble actually collapsing.
There are limitations. The recording does not possess the depth or clarity of IMA’s studio albums, and Kondo’s electric trumpet can become piercing at sustained volume. Listeners hoping for relaxed jazz improvisation will encounter something much harsher, while those expecting industrial funk may find the longer tracks too open-ended. The performances occasionally circle a groove after their argument has already been made. Yet this excess is intrinsic to the document. Kamikaze Blow is interested in what happens after a composition has passed its efficient studio length and must continue through collective energy alone.
The album finally demonstrates that IMA was not a studio concept masquerading as a band. Its collision of funk, electronics, avant-garde jazz and amplified rock becomes more convincing when exposed to risk. Without elaborate production to organize every detail, the musicians reveal the physical intelligence underneath their sound. Kondo remains the unmistakable focal point, but he is not carrying passive accompanists. He is standing inside a machine whose other components can push back. Kamikaze Blow captures that machine running hot: imperfect, abrasive and fully alive.