Harry Hosono & The Yellow Magic Band

Paraiso CBS/SONY, 1978

You say: “Haruomi Hosono’s Paraiso (1978) works a charm for me.” @TLRmakessound, via Twitter

Although it was an idea he’d hoped to develop with YMO, the first perfect realisation of Hosono’s “Japanese exotica” is on this 1978 LP recorded with Takahashi and Sakamoto. Deeply indebted to ’70s soft rock, it’s also eerily prescient of late-noughties chillwave. Best experienced alongside Hosono’s other LP from the same year, Pacific, in which city pop maven Tatsuro Yamashita and former Happy End guitarist Shigeru Suzuki collaborated on a defiantly lightweight mood album; Bob James shopping mall muzak as Fluxus art experiment. Also check out Happy End’s 1973 collaboration with Van Dyke Parks and members of Little Feat.