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The prospect of constructing an album with just one gargantuan music was a kind of tossed-off feedback that appeared like a joke. However when Shinji Sato put forth the thought, he was following a trajectory that outlined his life: dream massive, and see it by way of to completion. Lengthy Season, the 1996 magnum opus of Japanese rock band Fishmans, was a radical proposition: take an present monitor—the group’s six-minute single “Season”—and switch it right into a dreamlike suite that elevates their mild psych-pop to symphonic proportions. “After we made [Something in the Air], I hated having every music separated from the subsequent,” Sato stated of their earlier full-length. “Why not simply make it one music?”
Now not certain by single-digit runtimes, the band crafted a file that was huge in scope however suffused with on a regular basis heat. A mesmerizing piano motif and rocksteady bassline set the muse whereas Sato’s brilliant and guileless voice floats above. He sounds pleasant, like an affectionate drunk filling a room with optimistic vitality, playfully stretching syllables and delivering them with easygoing attraction. When he doesn’t sing, the remainder of the instrumentation will get to breathe, develop, and generally go haywire. Crucially, Lengthy Season doesn’t sound like a jam session; every passage is a self-contained world of sound that serves the drifting, daydream logic of the general piece.
Sato, Fishmans’ vocalist, guitarist, and charismatic chief, confirmed indicators of the type of ambition and tenacity wanted to drag off a grand-scale venture like Lengthy Season from a younger age. He was already a identified presence at Meiji Gakuin College’s Tune Writes Membership when drummer Kin-ichi Motegi attended an occasion for brand new college students. Motegi was shocked: “From the second he began singing, [Sato] had an aura on one other stage.” Quickly, the 2 began jamming collectively, and in 1987 they began a band, joined finally by guitarist Kensuke Ojima, keyboardist Hakase-Solar, and bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara.
Contemplating the sweeping art-pop of their best album, Fishmans had one thing of an inauspicious starting: They have been a reggae band. Japanese artists had been exploring reggae for greater than a decade by the early Nineties, however their vocalists had a extra skilled fashion than Sato’s scrappy and childlike supply. Fishmans’ debut, 1991’s Chappie, Don’t Cry, flopped commercially and critically, and a follow-up single, which doubled because the theme for a short-lived tv present, didn’t fare significantly better. One journalist accused the band of getting “no reggae soul.”
Early in his profession, Sato had written down his targets, lots of which concerned success within the music enterprise and his social life. He needed cash, he needed folks to listen to his songs, he needed recognition with ladies. After their debut LP and early singles didn’t make them stars, Sato and the remainder of the band started to lose their religion within the business. Fishmans needed to decide: Would they deal with extra TV tie-ins to assist with gross sales, or pursue inventive freedom? They agreed on the latter. Immediately, Sato had a brand new route in life. “I don’t need to make it massive,” he wrote in his journal. “Media interferes with inventive actions. There’s rather a lot we ought to be doing within the Japanese music scene.”
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