The prospect of creating an album with just one gargantuan music was a type of tossed-off feedback that appeared like a joke. However when Shinji Sato put forth the concept, he was following a trajectory that outlined his life: dream large, and see it by way of to completion. Lengthy Season, the 1996 magnum opus of Japanese rock band Fishmans, was a radical proposition: take an current monitor—the group’s six-minute single “Season”—and switch it right into a dreamlike suite that elevates their mild psych-pop to symphonic proportions. “Once we made [Something in the Air], I hated having every music separated from the following,” Sato mentioned of their earlier full-length. “Why not simply make it one music?”
Not sure by single-digit runtimes, the band crafted a file that was huge in scope however suffused with on a regular basis heat. A mesmerizing piano motif and rocksteady bassline set the inspiration whereas Sato’s brilliant and guileless voice floats above. He sounds pleasant, like an affectionate drunk filling a room with constructive vitality, playfully stretching syllables and delivering them with easygoing attraction. When he doesn’t sing, the remainder of the instrumentation will get to breathe, increase, and typically go haywire. Crucially, Lengthy Season doesn’t sound like a jam session; every passage is a self-contained world of sound that serves the drifting, daydream logic of the general piece.
Sato, Fishmans’ vocalist, guitarist, and charismatic chief, confirmed indicators of the form of ambition and tenacity wanted to drag off a grand-scale undertaking like Lengthy Season from a younger age. He was already a identified presence at Meiji Gakuin College’s Music Writes Membership when drummer Kin-ichi Motegi attended an occasion for brand spanking new college students. Motegi was surprised: “From the second he began singing, [Sato] had an aura on one other stage.” Quickly, the 2 began jamming collectively, and in 1987 they began a band, joined ultimately by guitarist Kensuke Ojima, keyboardist Hakase-Solar, and bassist Yuzuru Kashiwabara.
Contemplating the sweeping art-pop of their biggest album, Fishmans had one thing of an inauspicious starting: They had been a reggae band. Japanese artists had been exploring reggae for greater than a decade by the early Nineties, however their vocalists had a extra skilled fashion than Sato’s scrappy and childlike supply. Fishmans’ debut, 1991’s Chappie, Don’t Cry, flopped commercially and critically, and a follow-up single, which doubled because the theme for a short-lived tv present, didn’t fare a lot better. One journalist accused the band of getting “no reggae soul.”
Early in his profession, Sato had written down his objectives, a lot of which concerned success within the music enterprise and his social life. He needed cash, he needed folks to listen to his songs, he needed recognition with women. After their debut LP and early singles didn’t make them stars, Sato and the remainder of the band started to lose their religion within the business. Fishmans needed to decide: Would they deal with extra TV tie-ins to assist with gross sales, or pursue creative freedom? They agreed on the latter. All of a sudden, Sato had a brand new path in life. “I don’t wish to make it large,” he wrote in his journal. “Media interferes with inventive actions. There’s loads we must be doing within the Japanese music scene.”
