Yellow Magic Orchestra's Solid State Survivor with John Hwang

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Yellow Magic Orchestra's Solid State Survivor with John Hwang In 1979, three musicians in Tokyo — Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Yukihiro Takahashi — made an album that helped invent the future — Solid State Survivor, by Yellow Magic Orchestra. It's foundational to synth-pop, techno, and electro, and its fingerprints are all over 1980s pop and everything after. Made on early synths and drum machines when almost no one else in the world was thinking this way, they quietly wrote the blueprint for decades of music to come. The clearest proof is who they reached. The influence of this record runs straight through artists like Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, and Greg Phillinganes — a through-line from a Japanese synth album to some of the biggest names in Western pop and rock. We'll trace exactly how that happened, and play their records.