Saturday, March 7, 2009

The Main Course:


   EDITIONS is a collection of After Dinner's first album and a handful of live tracks. Essential listening for those interested in Japan's early 80's blend of baroque pop, prog, traditional Japanese music, and some electronic improv. This is highly regarded as being one of Japan's landmark new wave/experimental groups. The lead singer HACO, has lead a promising solo career since After Dinner's disbanding. I posted one of her solo records over yonder and the other After Dinner record was posted long time ago right here.

   However, EDITIONS remains my favorite After Dinner release. The charming beauty of Haco's voice holds a special allure to me, and I am constantly amazed how they amassed an array of different styles and sounds and managed to gel them into one coherent piece of stunning art. The live material here (tracks 10-18 are especially impressive)!

Pure Alchemy! (Link Updated)

6 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Thanks for all your interesting posts. I'd love to hear this record too but the files do not exist on any of the servers.

jAy @ jApAn said...

Thanks Christian...my mistake. Link has been updated. Let me know what you think of the album.

Unknown said...

Hi Jay, thanks for fixing the link so quickly.
I totally agree with you, it's a fantastic record! The group really succeeds in geling different styles without sounding eclectic at any time. This music aged impressively well.
Thank you for putting my attention on that one.

Anonymous said...

I envy the people who are hearing this wonderfulness for the first time!

sadunkal said...

Very interesting blog Jay. I discovered it while trying to find more info on After Dinner, I had heard a few songs from them and it sounded pretty interesting.

I also came across this, which might be of some use to certain people:
Psychh-Progg-JapanBy the way, you might also be interested in Need New Body, in case you didn't know about them already. Maybe you should also check out some Turkish music with somewhat interesting sounds, like Replikas, Babazula, DANdadaDAN... Or Tuvan-like music, like Sainkho Nahchylak, Mikhail Alperin, or whatever...