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This'll be a short write-up.
It should be no surprise that I like making pastiche. Sure, maybe it's "low art" but I still put effort in and enjoy it.
I listen to things and go "oohhh man I wanna make something like that". Such is the case when I listen to artists like Casiopea, T-SQUARE, Shigeru Suzuki, Shigeo Sekio
and of course, my idols: Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto & Yukihiro Takahashi AKA Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Unlike some of my other pastiche, this was a hard one because, well, jazz fusion is hard to write if you're not too good at music theory! I did a lot of fumbling until things
worked and largely operated on, for lack of a better term, vibe. I knew what moods and sounds I wanted to go after (particularly mid-80s Casiopea) so that was my starting point.
Honestly, the instrumentation does a lot of the heavy lifting. I wanted to try this a couple years ago (actually, both Awake and Grooving are a couple years old but got re-worked
and re-arranged for this), but I was missing something key as far as I was concerned: The Yamaha GS-1.
Minoru Mukaiya (Casiopea's main keyboardest for most of the band's history) made heavy use of one of Yamaha's first commercially available synthesizers. It was an FM synth in a big beautiful wooden
chassis-- the technology within eventually lead to the HUGE hit DX7 that pretty much defined 80s music for the latter half of the decade. Virtual DX7 synths are a dime a dozen; there are a number of
fantastic free options (Dexed) and paid options (I use Arturia' DX7 V) but there existed none for the GS-1. Why would there be? It was just a preset-bound precursor to the much more common and
much more versatile DX7. Ah, but the GS-1 had a built in Ensemble setting that produces a sound that makes my soul leave my body and I wanted it. To hear what I mean, listen to the first
chord from the first track (Take Me) from Mint Jams. It was more than a chorus. You couldn't get that sound with a DX7 and a chorus plugin slapped on top of it. It just didn't work. It's somewhere between
a chorus and a leslie/rotary but not quite either of them. On some settings, it sounds like the synth is being run through a bag of marbles in a washing machine, it's amazing. So to cut a long story short,
I did eventually come across a company who included a sample-based plugin of the GS-1 in an "FM Synth" suite. And it featured the "Acoustic Piano II" preset. And, of course, the Ensemble setting. We were off to
the races.
Anyway, yeah, that's pretty much the long and short of this one. The last song is just pure unadulterated YMO love.
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