Epo
Performance (Overture)
Shang-Hai Etranger
Tibetan Dance
Tibetan Dance (Edited Version)

I posted some Epo tracks a while back.

She’s fun.

To be honest, I really don’t know what else to say about her. She’s just…fun. Bubbly upbeat synthpop with a sound so “1985” that it’s gone from hip to dated to retro to dated to retro to hip three times over. Epo was incredibly prolific (a common trait I’m finding in 80s J-pop), releasing a whopping 13 records between 1980 and 1992. Her early stuff is much more “city pop,” that funk/soul/pop hybrid style that vaporwave artists are always drawing their samples from. But by the time the mid-80s rolled around she traded in that downtempo jazz for some uptempo 808s and went to work, releasing several fun albums during that period.

I’ll be honest, every Epo album I’ve bought to date has been a little uneven. Even the best of the bunch that I’ve found, Hi-Touch Hi-Tech, was a little touch and go, with slow ballads dragging it down just when it was getting good. Ditto goes for Pump! Pump! an album far more sedate than it’s double-exclamation point title would suggest. Harmony, the album from which tonight’s tracks are pulled from, suffers the same fate. Just when it gets the blood pumping with some upbeat bangers, a plodding mid-tempo ballad or a forgettable filler track slams the brakes on the whole thing.

But the bangers are bangers, man. I feel like I should point out that Epo is not just a “pop idol,” meaning a pretty face put in front of a microphone. She was a singer/songwriter, often writing the majority of tracks on her albums. Usually working with her was Nobuyuki Shimizu, a musical ubergenius who played with just about everyone of note in Japan. The back cover of Harmony proudly proclaims that Shimizu plays “all keyboards, guitars, bass, drums and many other instruments” on the album. The same goes for a lot of other albums he worked on at the time. He’s like the Jack Antonoff of Japanese 80s pop music.

Like I said, Harmony is an uneven affair, but when it’s on fire damn its on fire. The opener “Performance (Overture)” melds disco string melodies with driving electronic beats like its taking the best of “On The Radio” Donna Summer and “I Feel Love” Donna Summer. “Shang-hai Étranger” is another high point, with how it combines traditional Japanese melodies with some truly radical synthesizer work. Feels like it could be a YMO b-side.

The album’s true highlight, however, is kind of a ringer, it’s a cover of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Tibetan Dance,” which first appeared a year earlier on his Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia album. However, calling it a cover is a bit of a misnomer. It’s straight up the track that appeared on that album, with a bit of edits and overdubs, including Epo’s vocals. The back cover just flat-out says that the backing track for the song is taken from the Sakamoto album (with permission, of course). I wonder how often such things happen, pop singers taking solid instrumental tracks from electronic producers and just singing over them with minimal edits. If it doesn’t happen a lot, why the hell not? Seems like a good, valid shortcut for finding decent backing tracks. In addition to the album version, I’m also including a special edited version that appeared on a 12″ single.

I don’t think that Epo was ever a massive huge artist, but she must’ve been at least modestly successful in the 80s if her non-stop output is any indication. Strange then that so much of her stuff is woefully out-of-print. Some of her records haven’t even been re-released on CD (although all of her best ones have). I feel like this is a common fate for B-level J-Pop acts of that era. There were just so many of them (bubble economy y’all) that some have just gotten lost in the shuffle over time. And unless you were a megastar (Seiko) or found cult success later (Taeko Ohnuki) you kind vanish to the past. Someone really needs to compile this stuff Nuggets style so the world can rediscover the hidden gems that have been lost to Disk Union 100 yen bins.