Y.M.O.'s record Technodelic was released in 1981 and is a fascinating collection of electronic sounds and sublime packaging. The sounds are part of an era that gave the world Devo, Kraftwerk, New Order and Depeche Mode. For the Technodelic album the band embraced artwork that featured machine parts and cumbersome machinery that would have matched the look of the 1927 Fritz lang classic Metropolis. The shock of the new is shocking because it is not so new after all. The big knobs and glass dials refer to early forms of electronica that is pre-digital and pre-electronic. Petrol engines were still using chokes at that time as electronic fuel injection hadn't been invented and the mobile phone was referred to as a brick. The office furniture in one of the photographs looks like the furniture on display in Winston Churchill's war cabinet rooms in the London bunker. It is a world of Nordic severity, all hard lines and masculine edges with no female softness. That would have to wait for the bubblegum pop of the girl power era that would follow.
The Yellow Magic Orchestra was apparently put together to fuse electronica and Orientalism in an effort to subvert Orientalism The lyrics on this particular album, however, seem to be defined by a sense of existentialist alienation and uncertainty:
"In the shadows by the wall
The stairs go on forever
They could be steel
They could be stone
They could even be paper"
In 'Seoul Music' there are, however, references to a Korea that confronts the young Japanese electronic musicians with the past. Whilst Japan has emerged as a modern power and the young musicians want to free themselves from the shackles of Orientalism the past is not quite ready to let go...
"An example of life in old Korea
The girl wouldn't let me take her picture...
Kimpo airport
An old man with a stick in white baji chogori
with a black katsu on his head
The taxi driver kept asking me if I wanted a woman...
Roadside pillboxes with armed police in front...
There is a curfew from midnight till 4...
From Busan you can see Tsushima
The speed limit for passenger cars is 37 miles an hour...
Korea has air raid drill once a month...
People over 46 speak Japanese"
This is a perspective that Chinese tourists visiting North Korea today seem to feel. They are overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia looking at a pre-modern North Korea that reminds them of what China was like before the period of modernisation. A period of austerity but also purity of spirit and purpose not yet tainted by consumer culture and the rise of individualism.
