Haruomi Hosono – S-F-X

Haruomi Hosono’s first solo album after Yellow Magic Orchestra, S-F-X is a techno-pop classic featuring all-time favorites including “Strange Love” and “Alternative 3.” Despite the album being credited “with Friends of Earth,” it seems that the album was largely composed by Hosono with the assistance of his longtime engineer Yasuhiko Terada, who worked on many classic albums on Alfa Recordings including Minako Yoshida’s Monochrome. Hosono’s engineer reflects on the recording of the album: “I wanted to speed up the expression of sampling. I think Hosono wanted to be able to freely use scratch and hard attack sounds, and I was surprised at the realism of the piano and string sounds of the Kurzweil (released in 1983, the first ROM-based sampling sound source) in addition to the analog synths that had been used up until then.”

Read about the recording techniques used on S-F-X: https://insheepsclothinghifi.com/haruomi-hosono-recording-techniques-sfx/