Groovy synth Star Wars soundtrack from Japan (1978)

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/31/groovy-synth-star-wars-soundtr.html

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i dig it.

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Fun! Thanks for sharing.

I still like this one better, though. I forget where and when I first learned about it, might have been on BoingBoing years ago…

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Musicians gotta eat too!

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This was made using the Korg PS-3300, which is an incredible piece of hardware with truly insane specs. It’s a 48-voice polysynth, with 3 VCOs, 3 VCFs, 3 VCAs and 3 EGs per voice, plus 9 resonant voltage-controlled band-pass filters that are perfect for physical modeling / formant synthesis. I so wish I could have one…

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Here’s Isao Tomita’s chip in the SW game. Up until this, the great Tomita was100% classical-leaning, and took a surprising left-turn into this funkbeat cum easy-listening version (with a tongue-in-cheek ‘intrusion’ of a SW-treatment of the musical question-answer ‘music’ from Close Encounters of the Third Kind… as if to clearly signal his fans that he wasn’t taking this seriously and not to worry):

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I kept waiting for Flash Gordon to appear…

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I am SO FUCKING TIRED OF STAR WARS at this point. Stop. Just, please, stop.

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Love the Kosmos album. The truly haunting rendition of Solveig’s Song is almost gothic spaghetti western. And the vast, expansive soundscape Tomita achieves in The Sea Named Solaris - other worldly and magnificent.

Not to mention one of the best album covers of the 1970s!

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It’s definitely lost its sparkle for me. It’s literally almost everywhere now and very much in my face at all time.

Agreed. Disney and Star Wars can both take a hike nostalgia or not.

Agreed!

I hope that Tomita fans (and others) have discovered his own original compositions in film score orchestral music, such as The Tale of Genji and The Last Samurai, and his highly unusual classical/crossover Symphony Ihatov (live orchestra with anime singer).

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I still think Meco did it better. But it must be heard in the original 8-track, of course.

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Kosmos is still one of my retro favorite electronica albums.

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Symphony Ihatov has been in heavy rotation in my ear holes for the past few weeks, it is amazing. The singer is not some ‘anime singer’, but virtual idol Hatsune Miko. This was Tomita’s dream come true, adding a virtual singer to his music. This performance happened only 1 year before his passing. It has since been performed live on a few other occasions.

Here’s a snippet on YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orEEq7GWXTw

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This arrangement reminds me of the them song from Quark.

Star Wars is fantasy, not sci-fi, so the heavily electronic soundtrack doesn’t work for me. The Meco version was specifically for discos, so I could forgive the synthesizers there.

Zounds! Is virtual Miko “rotoscoped” to a live dancer off stage? Or is the conductor (as with a studio soundtrack performance) taking his cues from a pre-recorded Miko?

Miko is projected onto a screen, but they (Crypton Future Media, the developers of the vocoloid software) had to implement a new system so that Miko would react to the conductor. (Via a ‘manipulator’ and some time delay tech-babble) … more details in this wonderful article
https://columbia.jp/ihatov/concertreport.html

Just last night I downloaded ‘Misty Kid of Wind’ OST and realized that several tunes from this 1989 recording made their way into the Symphony … maybe there are others as well

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