Dinner Music 84: The weekly lineup
psych rock from japan and southeast asia, hybrid thai molam, jazz pop funk
This week we’re exploring Japanese psychedelic folk-rock, modern Thai molam and funk and groove throughout the rest of Southeast Asia. The albums and songs on the playlist span decades, though many are rooted in the sixties and seventies. I came across this thread on reddit and thought it was a good time to deep dive into some of my favorite artists from the other side of the world. Imagine: you’re in a smokey listening room in Tokyo sipping a highball and listening to a record that feels best new and nostalgic. That’s this week’s sound.
We begin with a legendary album from Ike Reiko, a famous “pink movie” (i.e. erotic) star. You, Baby unabashedly embraces sensual sounds with breathy vocals and honeyed groans over erotic jazz. A lonely saxophone floats in and out of the melody like a tease. A tinny xylophone plucks its notes one by one. The album is a maelstrom of sonically charged sexual frustration. Don’t listen to this with your parents. We move into a Japanese jazz album by shakuhachi1 player Minoru Muraoka. The album threads together traditional Japanese sounds with Western influence, with a percussion that could’ve been transported to Japan via Smalls in the West Village. The entire album brings to mind that underground, hole-in-the-wall jazz club sensation. If you’re looking to smoke a cigarette over a martini, start here. We ramp things up with Thailand’s Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band, a group of folks that began with a party, Paradise Bangkok, that explored international and rural sounds. The group took what they learned from crate digging and created something at once traditional, global, esoteric and psychedelic. It’s dance music, in the truest sense of the phrase. We’ve featured them once before, last August. There is a specific sound that I’ve only been able to find in Japanese artists — a sound that is at once pastoral and melancholic, ethereal and bright. Like that moment when you’re on a train that emerges from a tunnel to reveal a landscape that it is at once stunning and brutal. Kim Jung Mi creates this with Now, an album that brings to mind The Doors and Joni Mitchell. But, it’s not a riff off the Western art. It’s a new thing entirely. We end with Yura Yura Teikoku, an early project from “the emperor of mellow groove”2 Shintaro Sakamoto. Hollow Me was the psych-rock trio’s last album, a swan song to represent twenty-one years of underground, DIY music-making. Don’t miss this one.
Enjoy.
Also, if you’re in Austin and are looking for a dance plans this weekend, Horse Opera is opening for Bodysync at Kingdom on Saturday. We’ll be on 11-12:30am.
The playlist
Monday
You, Baby - Ike Reiko (1971)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Bamboo - Minoru Muraoka (1970)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
21st Century Molam - Paradise Bangkok Molam International Band (2014)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
Now - Kim Jung Mi (1973)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
Hollow Me - Yura Yura Teikoku (2007)
Spotify / Other streaming services
Pair with
Five ingredient miso pasta. Easy, peasy dinner recipe. Throw some salmon or flank steak on top and a salad with sesame vinaigrette on the side.
This Japanese rosé. I haven’t tried this, nor have I tried any natural wine (or any wine in general?) from Japan, but I have no doubt it’s interesting and probably fantastic.
Watching Perfect Days. The newest from Wim Wenders. Such a beautiful, simple film that will leave you with the happiest heartache of your life.
This interview with Alexander Chee. Shameless plug, because I did this interview. “Chee doesn’t talk about pain explicitly in this conversation. But you get the sense that he knows how to transform life into something beautiful.”
Thank you, thank you. Have a great week.
A traditional bamboo flute
https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2023/01/11/yura-yura-teikoku-hollow-me/
nice one!