7. Yellow Magic OrchestraYellow Magic Orchestra
This album always takes me back to hearing Miles Johnson, aka DJ Nature, from the Wild Bunch, cutting up two copies of this across two decks in a club in Bristol in the late 80s. Blew my mind. Hip hop makes you think about how you both listen to but also use old music, and hip hop was my education in music – every weekend I’d be learning how to sample from guys like Miles, and then just going second-hand record shopping. That was my education, sitting in rooms with Roni Size and others, listening to obscure albums all day for weeks, months, just to find breaks and samples and sounds. Just hearing Miles cut that album up – I knew I had to go find that record. Finding this stuff, then listening to it – it was like an epic adventure for me – it taught me at a really crucial formative time that a track could do anything. You want a track to have a twelve-minute intro, then a part where it just totally diverts, then an ending and then a crescendo? That’s fine!. I was like, “Wow, you can actually do that with music, it doesn’t have to follow these set patterns?” The wheels started to turn in my mind when I first heard this album and the fact it was kind of obscure at that time – certainly a lot less known than Kraftwerk say – made it extra special.
