Archive for the ‘Isao Tomita’ Category

Tomita Sounds & Sound Creature

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

I found this on Youtube the other day which includes some snippets of music that I have not heard from Tomita before including an excerpt from the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky and few and couple others.

Something that is also shown in the video is a picture of the Sound Creature album from 1977.

Now this is something you don’t see others artists doing and that is giving a detailed breakdown of how they made their music. Not only did it give the listener an audio deconstruction of the sounds he made but it also came with a booklet albeit in Japanese (though I have found a couple of pages that have been translated in to English)  telling the listener how he created his trade mark sounds with diagrams of the synthesizer modules required to do it, effects processing, even the stereo placement within the track, the example below goes through part of the track “Day Break” from the  “Daphnis and Chloe” album. Initially this was released in Japan but I have seen it on CD.

TomitaSoundCreatureEnglish1A

tomita-sound-1tomita-sound-2

And some sketches illustrating how he got some of the effects on his albums.

This was when synth’s like the Moog where the reserve of the few who could afford them and were much more of a mystery than they are now, much like the way he gave a listing of all the equipment he used to make an album though he stopped this after the release of Dawn chorus in 1982.

Japanese to English translations of Sound Creature by Peter Lenehan niport@ozemail.com.au and English document production by Lance Lenehan lance@soundscapemusic.com.
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What Isao Tomita did before he was famous

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

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”.

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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.

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