Yellow Magic Orchestra's Solid State Survivor with John Hwang

Yellow Magic Orchestra's Solid State Survivor with John Hwang In 1979, three musicians in Tokyo — Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Yukihiro Takahashi — made an album that helped invent the future — Solid State Survivor, by Yellow Magic Orchestra. It's foundational to synth-pop, techno, and electro, and its fingerprints are all over 1980s pop and everything after. Made on early synths and drum machines when almost no one else in the world was thinking this way, they quietly wrote the blueprint for decades of music to come. The clearest proof is who they reached. The influence of this record runs straight through artists like Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, and Greg Phillinganes — a through-line from a Japanese synth album to some of the biggest names in Western pop and rock. We'll trace exactly how that happened, and play their records. This is a chance to stop and actually listen to the full album on vinyl, on a system built to reveal every detail, with the stories behind how three artists in Japan set the next fifty years of music in motion. This is a listening session that is part history, part deep attention, part appreciation for one of the most important records most people have never truly heard. John Hwang is a New York–based music curator and the voice of @imjohnhwang, a channel devoted to the stories behind the records. His live listening sessions, held under the Presence of Attention banner, treat deep listening as a practice: pairing rare and beautiful records with the histories that made them, played on vinyl, in rooms built to reveal what usually goes unheard.