Radical TV – AV Kids (complete album download)

Just when I thought that I had hunted down every Yellow Magic Orchestra associated act that ever existed, no matter how incidental their connection to the uber-influential Japanese synthpop legends was, I stumble upon something that proves that I probably have even more to find, an incredible piece of lost techno-pop that renews my entire interest in the genre: AV Kids by Radical TV.

It’s very hard to dig up information on Radical TV in English. Strike that, it’s literally impossible to dig up any information on Radical TV in English. I suspect that when this blog post is complete, it will be the most anyone has ever written about the group in English.

A quick glimpse at Radical TV’s Discogs page shows that they only have two releases to their name, this mini-album that I’m sharing tonight, and a video release that was done in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto of YMO. That video album came out in 1988, while this EP preceded it by two years. They could have more releases though, Discogs is not all-knowing and all-seeing. In fact, their Discogs page had several mistakes that I am just now fixing as I’m writing this. Originally, the album’s page only had one credited artist on it, a man by the name of Yoshifumi Ito. Now, while Ito did seem to be a predominate creative force behind the group, in the album’s liner notes he’s not even credited as a member, the only people credited as actually being part of the group were Daizaburo Harada and Haruhiko Shono. Harada performed vocals on the album, but Shono’s role is a bit of mystery. While every other performer on the record is credited, in detail, with their contributions, he is not. He’s just listed as a member of the group, and nothing else.

Neither Harada nor Shono were very prolific in music, according to Discogs anyway. Outside of Radical TV, they only have a couple of credits to their names, all of which are visual or technical. While they’re credited as composers on a few tracks, I suspect that they were primarily responsible for the visual element of the band’s performances, which was something else (and I’ll be getting to in a bit).

The group was probably Ito’s baby, it certainly sounds like other albums and artists he was working with at the time. He produced records for synthpop acts like Shi-Shonen and Hajime Tachibana, who shared Radical TV’s sampler/fairlight-heavy sound. He also played keyboards on albums by Togawa Jun and Yukihiro Takahashi, who also had a sampler heavy sound at the time. He was very prolific throughout the 80s, according to Discogs I own 43 releases in which he receives some sort of credit.

While Ito was a keyboardist, he’s not the credited keyboardist on this album. The keys here are played by Hiroaki Sugawara. He also worked with several of the artists already mentioned here, as well as Ryuichi Sakamoto. In fact, he handled the Fairlight programming for Sakamoto and David Byrne’s Academy Award winning score to The Last Emperor. So hey, he’s got that going for him.

This may be a synthpop record with keys a plenty, but it’s also an 80s pop record, which can mean only one thing – extraneous saxophone! Saxophone duties on the album were handled by Hiroyashu Yaguchi. While he had a short-lived solo career in the later half of the decade, with two albums to his name, he was much more prolific behind the scenes. He also worked with Shi-Shonen and Hajime Tachibana, and was a member another synth act from the time, Real Fish. Additionally, he played on some albums by my favorite 80s pop idol, Epo, and everyone’s favorite city pop star, Taeko Ohnuki.

Finally, the album was “executive produced” by Yukihiro Takahashi, but I think that just means he thew some money and/or keyboards at it. The album was released on the T.E.N.T. sub-label of Pony Canyon, which handled a lot of Takahashi’s (very bad) solo albums from this period. I don’t know if T.E.N.T. was a vanity label that Takahashi set up, but they were obviously strongly connected.

So, that’s a lot about the people behind this music, but how is the music itself?

It’s fan-fucking-tastic.

Given the amazing quality of this record, and the people associated with it, I’m surprised that it took me this long to discover it. This is really a quality piece of late-80s synthpop, with Fairlight-a-plenty. The instrumental opener “Shot,” has a fantastic drum machine sound and an absolutely stellar keyboard melody. This sounds like a lost YMO track, it’s so good. The quality keeps up throughout the EP. “Frontier” sounds like a perfect amalgamation of Takahashi’s (good) solo work from the first half of the 80s, thanks to Harada’s wonky vocals, and Sakamoto’s sampler-heavy sound that he experimented with on Futurista. It has a fantastic groove to it as well.

With “愛のソビエト” (Soviet Love), things slow down a bit, but that Fairlight sound shines through, and Harada drops his Takahashi impression to deliver his best vocals of the album. It’s a nice quiet bit that is immediately brought to a close with the incredible, and incredibly jarring, “XYZ,” which features Speak and Spell samples and absolutely bonkers vocals that seem to combine actual singing and cut-and-paste samples. It’s a crazy track that reminds me of Thomas Dolby’s more adventurous material and some of the stuff that Takahashi would be doing nearly a decade later, when he would get out of his late-80s nadir.

A mechanical beat serves as a backbone for the ballad “TVアイドル” (TV Idol), which is probably the most standard pop song on the record. If this one was translated into English I could imagine Howard Jones or Nik Kershaw covering it, for good or bad. The synths on this one are actually a little bland until about halfway through, when a bizarre collage of nearly-random noise breaks things up. What really keeps the song going is that 80s sax. A slow jam, but a jam nonetheless.

And then we end with a cover of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” with all vocals delivered through a vocoder, with a steel drum sound that sounds like it was taken out of Super Mario Bros. 3, because why the hell not. It’s awesome.

 

As radical (he he) as the sound of this album is, the main members of Radical TV were visual artists first and foremost. The visual element of their persona seemed to be just as, if not more, important than the music. Despite only a single EP and a collaborative video album to their name, there’s quite a bit of Radical TV video up on YouTube, and it’s all really amazing with a lot of computer video effects that were definitely cutting edge. Some of it even has a digital/”cyber” aesthetic to it that feels a decade ahead of its time.

Much of their collaboration with Sakamoto can be found on YouTube, and I really suggest checking it out. From what I can gather, their collaboration, TV War, was used as a showcase for the then brand-new Sony Jumbotron, as you can see in this video and this one. The music/soundscapes are fantastic, and it’s all a really great look at how visual artists of the 80s were using the then-nascent technology of computer graphics to create some really fabulous stuff in a style that is largely forgotten today.

The group also released a video for the track “XYZ” and while it’s not as cutting-edge as their work with Sakamoto, it’s still pretty damn awesome.

 

He-Man! By the power of Grayskull! And a digital sampler!

I say “this shit is dope” a lot, but yo, “this shit is dooope.” I hope everyone likes it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2020 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Complete Albums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.