Haruomi Hosono is the sort of artist you keep rediscovering throughout your life. It may begin with Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering synth-pop trio he formed with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. Or it could start with his solo work, where he’s traversed everything from exotica to tape music to boisterous art pop. Dive into his credits, and his name pops up everywhere in the past half-century of Japanese music. There’s the folk boom of the 1970s, where he played in the groundbreaking rock band Happy End, but also on albums from Sachiko Kanenobu, Morio Agata, and Nobuyasu Okabayashi. He was there during city pop’s rise, too, performing on classic albums by Tatsuro Yamashita, Taeko Ohnuki, and Minako Yoshida.
“I was listening to everything,” Hosono tells me at least a dozen times in our conversation. It feels like an understatement. During the 1980s, Hosono appeared on cult classics of Japanese new-wave and electronic music, including LPs on Yen Records, the label he ran with Takahashi. Obsessed with arcade games, he made the first album fully inspired by their soundtracks; aptly, it’s titled Video Game Music. He also plays on the debut Pizzicato Five album, forging a throughline from his love for lounge and easy-listening to the roots of Shibuya-kei. He made IDM in the 1990s, glitch pop in the 2000s, and jumped on a live album with Ichiko Aoba in 2013. He’s made numerous film scores as well, most famous of which is for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters.
Throughout our conversation, Hosono periodically asks for time to think about what to say, as it is impossible to name a single artist or album that could define any period of his life. Still, he persists, his face always jovial as he reminisces over Zoom. He’s stationed at the bottom left corner of the frame, which draws attention to the poster on his wall. It’s for the 1934 Laurel and Hardy comedy Them Thar Hills: a testament to his love for the Western culture of the time.
Don’t mistake his fondness for bygone eras as an unwillingness to grow, though. This summer, he’ll perform a rare concert at the Southbank Centre in London. “What I’m trying to do now,” he tells me, “is to see what I can do with young people—people who are 50 years younger than me.” For Hosono, there’s always something new to learn.
