John Carroll Kirby on His Five Favorite Japanese Records

John Carroll Kirby: I play synth, so I like the later Hosono stuff and all the YMO stuff in the late 1970s and ‘80s. I hadn’t really explored Hosono House until about two or three years ago, when my girlfriend, Kiko, sat me down and was like, “This is important, check this out.”

For Hosono House Revisited, we decided to do “Fuku Wa Uchi Oni Wa Soto.“ I don’t fully understand the lyrics, but it’s something to do with an evil or mischievous spirit. There’s some traditional element where you throw soybeans at this monster that comes into your house, and it just sounded cool. 

In Japan, what [Americans] might consider spiritual or mythological might be woven in a more literal understanding. Like, if you’re feeling down, it would be common to say “Oh, there’s a bad spirit with you.” It’s a different way of thinking about things.

I wanted our recording to sound like a karaoke version. I set up a crappy mic, and we just ran it down a couple of times. I wanted it to have that kind of quality. Kiko is friends with [Hosno], so we’ve come to know each other a little bit. We actually played a gig opening for Hosono in Bali a few months ago. My girlfriend and her sister, Yuka came up and did “Fuku Wa Uchi Oni Wa Soto.” Then we played the [YMO songs] “Tong Poo” and “Rydeen.” So I feel like I’m on the verge of being in a YMO cover band.

Some tracks on Hosono House are kind of boogie-woogie or tongue-in-cheek, and on many of Hosono’s other records you hear a lot of physical comedy. On some of those YMO records they’ll even be doing comedy skits in between songs. So to me, Hosono’s music sometimes has a slapstick or comedic element to it.

Years before she lived there, the guitar or bass player of a band called the Crazy Cats used to live in my girlfriend’s apartment. So we checked out this YouTube video of them performing, and you can see all the slapstick involved, and I was just like, “This is sick.”

I kind of got it — the musical comedy and parody element that seems important to Hosono. It comes from a lineage in Japan.

There’s this one record by them that got reissued, and I was listening to it today. Some tracks are jazzy, kind of big band-y, and there’s a few surf rock-inspired ones. It’s clearly very Western jazz instrumentation — upright bass, piano, drums, guitar, and a couple of horns. But then the guy will come and sing in this old style, and it sounds distinctly Japanese.

Even [as a non-Japanese speaker], you can tell he’s being funny, and there’ll be these funny voices and call-and-response moments with the band. It’s all quite silly. It’s not music I put on when I’m walking down the street, but it’s interesting.

I was driving around with my girlfriend in Tokyo and she just put this on. I didn’t know Hosono, who produced and played bass on the album, was even connected. I guess you should just assume.

It’s pure, soulful, and influenced by American music. It made me think of early Minako Yoshida sings just sounds really cool. I was drawn to the cover as well. She has a beautiful face. 

To me, the 1970s is the Golden Era — when technology hadn’t got so good that you no longer had to be a good musician. You can feel the session in the recording, which I like. You can picture a big, beautiful recording studio and just see everyone looking at each other and grooving. The musicianship feels really high. It feels expensive. You get the feeling that they came into the session and knew everything that would happen.

I had that Kankyo Ongaku album, and I’ve checked out the ones that pop up in the YouTube algorithm a lot, but I’ve not gone too deep with the Japanese ambient music sub-genre. Ambient music isn’t something I put on all that much. But I like this because it’s in that ambient sound, but the compositions and the melodies are really clear, which makes it interesting.

What I thought was cool [about Yoshio Suzuki] captures it in a way that makes it beautiful, even though it’s very crisp. There’s upright bass, and there’s some digital element to it, too. And there’s a lot of drum machine, and sometimes it sounds like a real cymbal. I can’t tell if it’s an early sample, but I like where it sits.

I think Suzuki actually still gigs around Tokyo. I’ve heard that you can go and hear him in a jazz club playing bass. It’s a trip.

I haven’t seen the film that it was composed for, but it looks trippy, and I really like the music. It’s so weird. 

I don’t know a ton about it, but I’ve been vibing with it. It’s got this weird, impressionistic thing, and some elements make me think of Ninth Symphony in there, too. I like all the synths — there’s this sort of digital fat strings thing happening, and then a kind of harpsichord. It’s an interesting one that people don’t often talk about.

One of the guys from ALFA Records actually came to LA and gave a talk about what it was like to work with Hosono and he said all he wanted to do was be in the studio. This guy’s job was to find a way [to facilitate that], and he just built him this studio for him to crank stuff out. These guys were just making so much music. It feels endless, their catalog.