Technodon

About

Technodon is the seventh and final studio album to date by Yellow Magic Orchestra and released in 1993, a decade after the band's original breakup. Because the name Yellow Magic Orchestra was owned by former record label Alfa Records, the band were forced to release the album under the name YMO. For the tour that followed, they were billed as Not YMO. Future releases by the band would be made under the names Human Audio Sponge and HASYMO. The album's title has several interpretations: "don" can be read as "飩" and would therefore mean "Bowl of Techno", or as the onomatopoeia "ドン”, making the title "Explosion of Techno"; "don" could also be read as the Italian honorific term, rendering the title as "Lord(s) of Techno". At the time of recording, Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto were incorporating a lot of world music elements into their sound, which is still evident on Technodon; however, the sound is pared down, revealing simple technopop arrangements. Yukihiro Takahashi mainly used drum machines for the record as opposed to a drum kit. Like many artists at the time, YMO faced many potential legal troubles due to copyrights associated with sampled sounds from other artist's work. In this environment, using samples on the album was out of the question; a matter that Sakamoto was quite angry about. The new sound confounded older fans of the band while drawing in new listeners. Sakamoto's response to criticism was "This is YMO." The album artwork, designed by Stefan Sagmeister, featured diffraction grating on the CD jewelcase, allowing messages composed by American artist Jenny Holzer to be read through the lens; the text is otherwise illegible. The cover's text read "Slipping into madness is good for the sake of comparison" when the disc was packaged, but Sagmeister designed the the sleeves to be interchangeable, allowing the consumer to choose his or her cover.

via Last.fm