Akiko Yano

★★★ Ai Ga Nakucha Ne

WEWANTSOUNDS. CD/DL/LP

Singer’s 1982 collaboration with Japan’s Mick Karn, Steve Jansen and David Sylvian. The first Japanese musician to embrace sequencers – employing Yellow Magic Orchestra as her backing band – Akiko Yano was on an electropop roll in the early 1980s, putting a ribbon on a synth trilogy initiated with Gohan Ga

Dekitayo. Ai Suru Hito Yo and the bright, bubbly title track find the singer repeatedly short-changed as just a Japanese Kate Bush, painting great silken pictures in deceptively powerful tones. Only the haunting Kanashikute Yarikirenai (whose choppy marimbas are reminiscent of Forbidden Colours) and fleeting closer Good Night (a smoky duet with David Sylvian) betray the presence of Japan and co-producer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mick Karn’s fretless bass curiously low in the mix. As with Pennie Smith’s cover shot – Yano alongside a friendly cow – its twisty, exploratory contents reaffirm its creator’s maverick spirit.