The older I get, the more I appreciate teachable moments. It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote about “The Suzuki’s” self-titled 1998 release. Now, in the span of a month, I know so much more of what I didn’t then. Most importantly, as I choose to highlight Takako Suzuki’s Nuage, I’m able to correct the record and give credit where credit is due.
You see, The Suzuki was never the producer’s project I made it out to be. A helpful reader’s comment, “SŪZUKI is in fact Takako Suzuki (鈴木貴子), she was a member of smart (スマート). Her first album is titled Nuage which was released in 1992 (under the name Súzuki)” — finally centered who was really behind this music.
Looking at my copy of Nuage, I tried to make sense of how I missed the connection. Was it that I couldn’t connect this Súzuki with that Sūzuki? No, I understood that both existed but couldn’t definitively find anything linking them. In the end, it turns out it wasn’t something as simple as an accent mark or the lack of Takako’s name in the credits. It was something else.
Takako Suzuki belongs to our generation. Born in 1972, Takako was raised in Nakano, that vibrant neighborhood in western Tokyo where otaku culture breathes a different kind of air. Condensing the futurism and traditionalism of better-known wards into a more distinct style, it has long been a breeding ground for Japan’s counterculture. It’s in this atmosphere that Takako’s own love of music was born.
As a teenager, in 1989, Takako entered Yamaha’s BIG EOS DAY synthesizer competition and won the grand prix outright, winning over lead judge Tetsuya Komuro, the musician who helped promote, design, and program demos for Yamaha’s famous all-in-one synthesizer. Tetsuya would describe her as “a next-generation artist more of a genius than I am.” Unsurprisingly, it would be Tetsuya who became an early champion of her music, backing her at Toshiba EMI and taking on the role of executive producer for what would become her debut, 1992’s Nuage. Under the influence of cubism, Takako would take on the pseudonym Súzuki, modeling the stress in her stage name on the intonation of “Picasso.”
Recorded June-November 1991, when Takako was 18, Nuage reveals no lack of ambition. Although every track was composed, arranged, and programmed entirely by Takako, the record was afforded the financial and professional support usually reserved for a big-name act: session players like guitarist Yuji Toriyama joined in, and Tetsuya himself contributed piano and synths. Additional production and mixing by Goh Hotoda (who was mixing absolutely huge names like Madonna and Janet Jackson at the time) signaled a major-label investment. Recording at Toshiba EMI’s Studio Terra (in the Shinagawa port district) and at Sound Sky in Takako’s home turf of Nakano cemented that all those involved saw something special, or some potential, in her career.
Debuting in May 1992, Nuage was pitched as “Digitalian New Age,” a nod to Komuro’s 1989 album Digitalian Is Eating Breakfast, in a way fashioning Takako as carrying the torch of Japan’s ’80s techno-kayo or techno-fusion sound into the next decade. One listen to Nuage proves that Takako had her own thoughts.
Although Takako would only sing on two of the album’s tracks, the breadth of ideas across all of them pointed to a future that was distinctly hers. Songs like “Decolage” reveal the early influence of the global electronic dance scene, showing off arrangements that draw from techno and house music. Her one single as Súzuki – a promo-only 12″ of “Iron Mountain” pressed for DJs – took a different tack, choosing to home in on heavier hip-house. Everywhere on the record you hear this young artist drawing from more contemporary influences, sounds, and experiences.
On tracks like “Sound Sleep” one can pinpoint earlier influences. To my mind, artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto, especially his Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, must have played a heavy role in showing a path for Takako’s effortless blend of Japanese sonics with contemporary urban grooves. For all of Takako’s prodigious compositional talents, on it and “In Sight” the seed of a pop artist sits not so hidden inside her work.
For those who bought this rare CD, the booklet never prints her full name or any kanji, which is why her identity stayed hidden. The obi’s own pitch, “まだ誰も知らない” (no one knows her yet), stayed literally true for over thirty years. Normally, here’s where I would end my review, but I want to linger on what happened with Takako afterward.
In the promising beginning of Takako’s solo career, she befriended Tsuyoshi Yamanaka (who, sadly, passed away in 2022), the synthesizer operator at Súzuki’s debut showcase. Together they’d start from phrases like “a whitish-sounding pad” or “a yellowish-sounding sequence” and work them into concrete forms, “sounds close to sine waves,” “clavichord-like sounds”, realizing along the way that they shared enough ideas to keep going as a band.
For a brief moment, after her debut passed quietly, Takako withdrew to the background and turned to commissioned work: music for runway shows like 英保優之’s Tokyo Collection, TV soundtracks, and early CD-ROM music. Whatever ideas she had with Tsuyoshi would have to wait until the right opportunity came along.
Shortly thereafter, Takako and Tsuyoshi would come together as sm:art and embark on releasing music with many distinct touches — Asian, female-forward, and experimental. According to archived pages, sm:art (the proto-smart) debuted in 1993 on Toshiba EMI with an EP, 夢想美術館 -reverie musee-, which showed off their impressive synergy.
Songs off 夢想美術館 -reverie musee- like “Deep Sea Fish,” “Flower,” and “Paradise” showed the promise of Takako’s songwriting, debuting pop sounds and ideas that don’t feel like they belong to the prevailing Shibuya-kei scene. Takako’s collaboration with Tsuyoshi freed her to explore different styles and steer clear of riding any trend, as Tsuyoshi’s guitar playing and sonics added an edge to their sound. With time, they’d rechristen themselves smart, uniting their belief in “art” music.
In 1993, Takako’s vision of exploring “the pops channel within” would come to fruition when she found its missing piece, a true lead singer: Sachi. At the Wacoal Art Center’s Spiral space in Minami-Aoyama, Takako met a stunning vocalist and lyricist who moonlighted as a model and a visual artist. As smart, beginning in 1995, the trio would start their impressive run of two albums and seven singles — five of which would be released in the CD-EXTRA format with videos, another futuristic experiment of theirs. Forward-thinking albums like their 1995 self-titled debut, in hindsight, sound like a pop group raised on the music we’re just now discovering. Their single “月だけが知っている” (Only the Moon Knows) was released as the “world’s first hybrid (Windows 95 & Macintosh) enhanced CD-Extra single” and can be seen above, uploaded to YouTube months after Tsuyoshi passed away.
Billing themselves as a “next-generation” unit, their idea appeared to typify creating genre-free music that took cues from both the “alt” world and cutting-edge pop. Thankfully, for those of us who haven’t scored a copy of their little-known debut, UMG was wise enough to upload their music to YouTube so we can hear that impressive fusion they were going for.
Impressive dance-influenced music like “Day Dreamer,” “Balloon,” and “恋のそぶり サヨナラの香り” (Signs of Love, the Scent of Goodbye), to name precious few, was warm, tasteful, and complex — J-pop that should have heralded the rise of a different scene. The video introduction to their world expertly captures that sophistication and their recording process, with each band member playing their role to flesh out Takako’s maturing ideas.
One wonders what changed after their debut. In 1996, perhaps because of their lack of success in Japan and surprising success in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, for their next record, 彩虹 -Zai Phon- (Rainbow), they smoothed out their edges, landing on gentler, more mainstream songs. Their archived website spoke of creating a site in Mandarin. A single, “虹の果てまで” (To the End of the Rainbow), would appear on Fuji TV’s 夢の船・未来丸 variety show.
In spite of help from the likes of Yukihiro Takahashi and Hiroshi Takano, it sounds like some of the magic was gone. No longer produced entirely by themselves, outside hands traded some of their more artful experimentation for MOR songwriting. Yoshifumi Iio, who took over as producer, appeared to lose some of the plot of what made their debut unique.
Affecting a Sino-Japanese sound and aesthetic on the CD, album opener “桜” (Sakura) made them sound like part of that era’s Cantopop scene. Other songs, like the Shibuya-kei-styled “Eternal Kiss,” made them sound like bit players on their own album.
One wonders where smart would have landed if they had followed their own instincts. Songs like “Sweet” pointed in a new direction tied to the evolution of dance music. Their more Southeast Asian-tinged music, like “最後の涙” (The Last Tear), featuring erhu and other traditional instruments, remains an impressive evolution of the smart sound. Sweet asides like “青いスカーフ” (Blue Scarf) suit them well, too. But hear-once-and-forget songs like “Smile” and “赤” (Red) fail to register, pointing to all those involved having run their course together.
After they went on hiatus in 1997, one can imagine that Takako took time to take stock of just what she could do. It’s there we have to go back to the beginning, when Takako, no longer a child prodigy, didn’t give up on music and kept creating. We should remain thankful that Yosuke Kakegawa, much like Tetsuya, heard those demos and, in his words, “[basically helped] shape and polish the raw material she had prepared, using the vocabulary and production techniques of what was then called ‘electronic music,'” as he told a fellow Discogs contributor during an extensive conversation we had there tracking down what’s what on that record.
It’s not often an editorial note leads me down such a rabbit hole, but I hope this long form correction helps place Takako Suzuki front and center, where she always belonged.
