Album Closure: Invoked with the title of 'Epilogue' the music itself acts as an effective summation of the album's focus on samples while still being YMO at its core, being a neoclassically-inspired closing piece punctuated by sampled factory sounds.Raise your tropes above your head, bring them down to shoulder height: Technodelic was supported by two singles: 'Pure Jam' and 'Taiso', the latter of which got a music video directed by none other than American Post-Punk band Talking Heads (fronted by, sure enough, David Byrne). The album's extensive reliance on sampling also acts as a precursor to the sample-heavy approaches of various other artists later in the 80's, from the Avant-garde Music of Art of Noise and Frank Zappa to art pop acts like Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush to the entire Hip-Hop genre, the latter of which YMO previously influenced with their debut album. The 649 itself would later go on to be used by other Japanese synth-pop acts, including YMO associates Chiemi Manabe and Logic System.

Sampling became an integral part of Technodelic, allowing the album to act as an unprecedentedly complex collage of different sounds: in fact, while David Byrne & Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Jean-Michel Jarre's Les Chants Magnetiques earlier in 1981 had already beaten YMO to the punch of being the first albums to focus on samples and looped rhythms, Technodelic stood above them both by being the first album where these techniques made up the majority of it from front to back, to the point where even the band's vocals were used as samples. With this tool at their disposal, YMO could get far more creative with their songs than they could've ever imagined, exemplified by the record's layered Lyrical Cold Open. The first PCM-based sampler in the world, the device was far beefier tech-wise than the rival Fairlight CMI and Synclavier that had risen to prominence the previous year, featuring 12-bit audio depth (compared to the Fairlight's 8), a 50 kHz sampling rate, 128 KB of dynamic RAM, and the ability to double as a drum machine, all of which allowed for better sound quality and wider levels of applicability than its commercial counterparts. More specifically, for this album, the band adopted use of the LMD-649, a digital sampler custom-built for them by Kenji Murata of Toshiba EMI. The songs on the album are even icier in sound than BGM months prior, with haunting, minimalist arrangements and even less conventional song structures, aided by the band's continuing embrace of advancing technology. The second of two albums that the band put out that year, it marks the culmination of the increasingly avant-garde direction that they had been taking throughout their discography (barring the one-off comedy album Г—в€ћMultiplies). Technodelic, released in 1981, is the fifth studio album by Japanese Synth-Pop supergroup Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Risen from darkness album cover