If you wondered how Tomita hit the ground running so well in 1974 with his first major album “Snowflakes are dancing” then this might help explain why.
Two years earlier in 1972 he made a cover album of pop music around that time under the name of “Electric Samurai” called “Switched on rock”.
Track listing with some listenable ones
01 – Yesterday
02 – Let It Be
03 – Imagine
04 – Hey Jude
05 – Jail House Rock
06 – Love Me Tender
07 – Pork Salad Annie
08 – You Dont Have To Say You Love Me
09 – Sound Of Silence
10 – Mrs Robinson
11 – El Condor Pasa
12 – Bridge Over Troubled Water
We know that he had heard Wendy Carlos’s “Switched on Bach” and was so impressed that he got his own Moog modular in 1971 and this must have been his reply to that but doing his own versions of current music of the day with the styles we would hear in “Snowflakes are dancing” and “Pictures at an Exhibition”.
Listen to the beginning of “Bridge over troubled water” and tell me that you cant hear the latter “Great Gate of Kiev” from Pictures.
Some of the tracks work better than others but that early Tomita musical style is all there and you can see that when he used it on the later classical music it worked much better, probably because the ones on this album were so well known it would have been difficult for many to take his new sound seriously.
Tags: 1972, Electric Samurai, isao tomita, switched on rock
Electric Samurai was the name it was released under in the UK. I have 1974 as the UK release date so it could have been in response to “Snowflakes” though I’ve not verified that.
The album came out in 1972 on Columbia Japan (Sony) with no featured artist’s name with the title of “Switched On Hit & Rock”
When I talked to him a decade ago he actually brought the album up. I was just vaguely familiar with it so I couldn’t ask many detailed questions about it. One of the things he made very clear is the Japanese record industry did not consider Switched on Bach proper Classical music so they did not know where to file it in terms of genre. I don’t believe it got a proper 1960s release in Japan, am I correct? So he was only introduced to it in 1969 at preparations for the Expo (Tomita composed for Toshiba’s multimedia multichannel spectacle). The genre issue and disinterest in synth music definitely played a role when he wanted to produce albums. He had only known about electronic sounds for what he considered as sound effects use. He held Switched On Bach as proof of the potential to create new orchestral sounds.
I wasn’t able to verify this but since this album was released by Columbia Japan (Sony) I can see that firstly there wasn’t a conflict with it being pop music and then the good timing that the Japanese release was in quad. My theory is Sony likely was looking to acquire material to release in quad given their drive to promote quad hardware.
When trying get a release of “Snowflakes”, this album didn’t help other than surely gaining experience using his synth. He ran into the genre problem in Japan and was rejected by Japanese labels. He proposed his Debussy album to RCA in New York and they were happy to release it, so through the 80s his contract was with U.S. RCA though he did stay with BMG Japan after that until around 2000.