Blessed are those who have background info to work from.
I say this because I need to come clean about the album I’m writing about here: I have little to no info about those behind the music. With great pain, I have in my possession this wonderful work – Plus Cross Power Flower – whose main contributor’s history, Tetsuya Kataoka, seems lost to the sands of time, and the other to the hands of fortune-telling and the “occult,” Wakako Kimura. So, humor me, as I try to guide us through it some other way.
In my mind, one way to tackle albums like these is to place the reader in the place of the writer. It’s by inviting you to take a vision test of sorts. I’d like for you to read these names:
S O I C H I T E R A D A – M A K O T O M A T S U S H I T A
M A S A Y U K I C H I Y O – I K U O K A K E H A S H I – M I N O R U MO R I T A
T E T S U Y A K A T A O K A – W A K A K O
Can you tell me which artists on the board you recognize?
For most of you, I think the big standout names are Soichi Terada and Makoto Matsushita. After that, things get fuzzier. Perhaps some of you have run into the names of guitarist Masayuki Chiyo or percussionist Ikuo Kakehashi (who’ve added their flavor to many Japanese recording sessions). As for those names after this, that’s when our vision starts to peter out, and we start to raise our hand signaling, “I don’t know any of those names.”
So, here’s where I have to don my pseudo-optometric hat and try to focus on what we do know to get to that which we don’t.
Cross Power Flower was recorded and released in 1992. If you lived through that time, you’d remember how the era was dominated by the rise of alterna-rock, hip-hop-tinged new jack swing, and hits spanning the birth of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” to stuff like The Prodigy’s “Out of Space.” As with the start of any new decade, it was a time marked by all sorts of in-between music—of music trying to find itself through a blend of other sounds misfit for their birthed niche, derived from other eras.
One could imagine the duo Plus found themselves in the same mercurial musical mist as other groups or artists like P.M. Dawn, Aphex Twin, The Future Sound of London, and Mixmaster Morris’s The Irresistible Force project. Just what does one do with all this music one can pull from in that age?
Looking beyond the death of New Wave, groups like these looked one generation backward and forward. From the ‘70s and ‘60s, they took psychedelia, bossa nova, exotica, and other styles untouched by the Beatles boom. From the future, they experimented with newfound grooveboxes, samplers, and electronic instruments to create a machine-driven sound that gave a distinct digital edge to their wiggier ideas.
It’s that year, 1992, that proves pivotal in understanding Plus. In England, we begin to hear the rise of groups like Saint Etienne and Stereolab—groups that realized pop music didn’t exactly have to divorce itself from the rising techno or house scenes. Intelligent dance music could also move in other, different, mysterious ways. It’s something we’d see popularized as huge groups like U2 toyed with it on Achtung Baby before going full-bore a year later on their infamous Zooropa. It’s in that milieu of music that the duo Plus found themselves.
It was singer Wakako who had a direct connection to a new English sound. Born in England but raised in Yokohama, Wakako seemed to have an affinity for English-style folk music and was responsible for a good bulk of their songwriting and most of their vocal arrangements. Tetsuya Kataoka’s contribution to the duo seemed to lie in his panoramic command of Asian music, composing most of their music and commanding just as many acoustic and electronic instruments.
In hindsight, it seems fortunate that the duo found themselves under the guidance of Soichi Terada. In 1992, Soichi began to move away from early YMO-influenced technopop into a headier world influenced by the European rave and dance club scenes. For him, it would be those pioneering “Far East Recordings” with Shinichiro Yokota that would cement his legacy in the dance music realm. With Plus, together they complemented their respective explorations, uniting and mixing new directions of their own making (even if this recording remains even more elusive).
Visually, it starts by exploring this idea of the “Far East.” You see this in the duo’s crossfade of Indonesian folk attire with a grab bag of Central Asian and even Persian imagery on Cross Power Flower’s album cover and design. In the music, we hear something that sounds like the inverse.
Album opener “ルールへの導き” sets the rules—it reorients the Western idea of psychedelia through the prism of Asia itself. Opening a Pandora’s box of things flying out, you get gorgeous, Renaissance-tinged songs like “Name Is Rose,” leading to their first truly realized avant-pop statement, “Have You Ever Felt The Road Of Shiny Day.”
On “Have You Ever Felt The Road Of Shiny Day,” you get to hear Soichi’s sparkling, warm, and open-hearted dance production blend quite seamlessly with Tetsuya and Wakako’s equally shining, yearning, earnest Baroque Pop-influenced indie pop which itself seems partly inspired by that old Americana chestnut, “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Stretching out over six minutes, Cross Power Flower starts to get its wings by beginning to sound like an album meant for those lazing around the grass doing their bit of dancing through their heads in the clouds.
You hear Plus’s gorgeous take on toontown popcraft (think Itchycoo Park and early Disney) on songs like “Made In Nova.” For an album released in the early ‘90s, it seems like some of its DNA belonged to impressive ideas heard in the music of latter-half of that era, like that from the Elephant 6 or Paisley Underground, to like-minded bands like Broadcast, Everything Play or Hosono’s World Standard and Swing Slow, and even earlier “soft” songwriters like Van Dyke Parks or Paul Williams.
Songs like “Under The (Big Full) Moon” tip their hand to the nouveau-New Romanticism of groups like OMD, The Cure, and their closest early brethren, The Young Marble Giants. What all this band mad-libbing amounts to is this: Plus knew enough to go forward in their own direction.
“The Colours” remains an impressive quasi-ambient, quasi-triphop, quasi-Baroque pop rumination because it doesn’t easily slot into Plus’s own influences. Little atmospheric side quests like “I IX IX I IX” and “I IX IX IV” feel of this spirit, cluing you in (as a listener) not to expect what you think. Songs like “シャモウ・ダンス” might spirit in the twee pop of Glasgow only to woosh it out with their own floaty, ambient thing. Then something like “ボクはもうたくさん [Cross Power Version]” transfuses the Madchester sound into their own kaleidoscopic psychedelic quasi-techno wonderland.
Cross Power Flower works because it appears like its own Lonely Hearts Club Band. Who would expect a lovely madrigal like “Venetian Sky” to exist next to mad Zappa-esque workouts like “Funny, But Love Song,” and that to exist alongside beautiful Nuggets-style open-hearted love songs like “Felicity In Your Life”—only to wind down to stately, Eno-like ambient ballads like “Greenwich [Cross Power Version]”?
It seems hard to believe, but there was a time when Plus was a known quantity—when the original version of “Greenwich” was the end theme to an equally surreal Fuji TV series called アルファベット2/3, which attempted to script the Heisei generation’s own journey through that new decade. Much like that series, Cross Power Flower remains a beguiling piece of bedroom-style pop with high drama that feels exactly like the kind of mishmash a younger generation of that era would create in such a time.
My hope is that, with time, we get to know more than enough about those we know so little of who made this grand, fantastic, music.
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