Sakamoto 1996

Like his fellow Yellow Magic Orchestra alumnus Ryuichi Sakamoto, keyboardist and programmer Haruomi Hosono has a taste for exotic experimentation. But the similarities pretty much end there. Sakamoto's solo work runs to a sort of light contemporary classical music, and his collaborations have tended to be with pop musicians. On N.D.E., Hosono teams up with a host of sidemen both famous (bassist Bill Laswell) and obscure (saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu, violinist Arun Bagal) to create a beautiful, funky, and yet strangely creepy collage of electronic beats, modal melodies, and exotic samples…

Tomoyasu Hotei, known as HOTEI (‘hoe-tay”), is an acclaimed Japanese guitarist, songwriter, composer, performer and record producer, who currently resides in London. HOTEI has sold more than 40 million records in a 35 year career to date, and is best known internationally for the song “Battle Without Honor or Humanity”, which was made famous by its inclusion in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” movie. HOTEI began his career in 1981, as co-founder, guitarist and principal songwriter of legendary Japanese rock band BOOWY, (“boy”), who enjoyed phenomenal success as one of Japan’s most popular and revered bands…

Arto Lindsay has come a long way since his early days as one of the prime architects of downtown New York's no wave sound, a period when he played untuned guitar in the noise trio DNA and served as the first vocalist for the Golden Palominos. Since then he's been a fairly ubiquitous guest artist and has pursued his own interest in the music of Brazil (where he was raised), as well as taking a detour into slightly avant-garde dance-pop with the group Ambitious Lovers. His solo work in recent years has gotten a bit mushy, perhaps, but Prize finds him tightening things up. The drum'n'bass textures that lay on the surface of his last album like laminate are more fully integrated this time out: "Prefeelings" combines a fractured breakbeat with salsa-fied acoustic guitar and saxophones; "Resemblances" smears subtle intimations of electronic mayhem under Latin percussion and guitar, while Lindsay sings lines like "Stay calm/Keep calm/Let the room outgrow the walls" in a dry, laconic voice.