Yukihiro Takahashi, founding member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, died on January 11, at the age of 70. His office made the announcement last Saturday, in the columns of the “NHK ” and « JapanTimes “. The musician is said to have died of pneumonia contracted at the beginning of this year. Without giving more details. He had also undergone surgery to remove a brain tumor in the summer of 2020.
Born June 6, 1952, Yukihiro Takahashi first became known in the music industry as the drummer of the Sadistic Mika Band in the early 1970s. , in the first part, during the Siren tour, between 1975 and 1976. At that time, Yukihiro Takahashi scoured the recording studios for various projects in the shadows. It was during this period that he met Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono, creator of the rock group Happy End.
Together they decide to go up their Yellow Machine Orchestra, from 1978, to imagine exotic and computer sounds that would become the avant-garde of electronic music, long before the Germans of Kraftwerk. The Japanese trio have fun plugging in the expensive and complex Japanese machines, which will flood the world’s sound systems in a few years. Like a Holy Trinity, they distil in their album modular sounds, brought by computers and other synthesizers, like Moog III, Korg’s PS-3100 or Oberheim’s 8-Voice.
The keyboards of Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto become the signature of their musical experiments, long before anyone else. To echo the binary, precise and dense rhythms of Yukihiro Takahashi. In a few years, the Yellow Magic Orchestra became the figurehead of the techno/new wave movement, until its separation in 1984.
Today, the group has become a source of inspiration for many artists, from Eric Clapton to Duran Duran via Mac DeMarco or Gary Numan. Many of his sounds or music have been sampled since the 1990s, like Jennifer Lopez, De La Soul, Justice or Martin Galway, who is inspired, on his “Stryker’s Run by”, by the Japanese hit “Rydeen”. imagined by Yukihiro Takahashi himself.
After this legendary adventure, the drummer and singer continued his career alone, in a large number of studio chapters. But also collaborating with many musicians, from the experimental Bill Nelson to Iva Davies of the new wave group Icehouse or the rocker Keiichi Suzuki of the Moonriders. Before finding his friend Haruomi Hosono, in the early 2000s, in the Sketch Show project. Then joined by Ryuichi Sakamoto, in 2004, to form Human Audio Sponge.
With the death of Yukihiro Takahashi, Japan loses the first of the pillars of its most inventive and contemporary music. As evidenced by his comrade Ryuichi Sakamoto, on his Twitter account, as he prepares the release of a new solo album, “12”, scheduled for digital on January 17. As a tribute, he posted a minimalist message, in the form of a gray square. As if their yellow magic orchestra had tarnished. For eternity.
