Akiko Yano – Japanese Girl

If Yellow Magic Orchestra really were, as lazy music journalists like to claim, the “Kraftwerk of Japan”_, then Akiko Yano was Japan’s Conrad Schnitzler, the one who made it all possible in the first place and did the much cooler shit in the slipstream. Their debut album “Japanese Girl”, which was re-released this year, is often compared to the sound of a young Kate Bush, even though it was released two years before her debut. Innovation and vision are one thing, Yano’s music is another: rarely catchy, yet weird, traditional and modern at the same time.