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.
