New Year’s Day 1979, Hirasawa family house in Kameari, Tokyo. The members of freshly dead Mandrake and Susumu’s brother, Yuichi, sat around and discussed the band’s future. Progressive rock wasn’t cutting it anymore for Mandrake, and the growing pains connected to the genre’s decline in Japan propelled them to change their artistic direction. At the time, Susumu Hirasawa dabbled in a more electronic style of music, and felt like punk and new wave that came from the West might be the sound of the future. After a lengthy meeting, the crew decided to officially uproot Mandrake, and create P-Model. Almost everyone was on board with this project, excluding Tohru Akutu, who was too bound to prog rock and couldn’t see himself working on a synth punk band. Due to him deciding to stick to prog rock either way, he was kicked from the band. After this, Katsuhiko Akiyama took his place as the new bassist for P-Model, despite never picking up a bass before.
A prominent part of P-Model’s rise was Masahide Sakuma, a member of the iconic prog-rock band Yonin-Bayashi, who was transitioning to new wave at the same time as P-Model. Sakuma’s new band was called Plastics, and they, just like P-Model, became a staple in the blooming Japanese new wave scene. Sakuma helped Hirasawa produce P-Model’s debut album, In A Model Room.
In A Model Room (1979)
Stationed in Sunrise Studio, neighbouring the freshly opened Ikebukuro Sunshine City apartment complex, P-Model started the recording process of their debut album. The project was recorded in 2 months and released another 2 months after, but contrary to what the rapid tempo might suggest, the production was not exactly smooth sailing. P-Model, Sakuma, and Warner (the label P-Model was signed to) were constantly clashing over the sound and equipment. While Sakuma frequently took the side of the band against the label, he yielded a few times during the production, because to him, the album simply did not sound good. Hirasawa and co. argued that it is the whole point of the album to sound like that. The label and Sakuma tried to rent or gift P-Model expensive Western equipment, but the band adamantly stayed with the Japanese gear they bought with money they saved from selling off some irrelevant Mandrake days gear. Sakuma managed to change the sound on nearly all instruments; including the Yamaha YC-10, which produced a clicking sound that was unacceptable to the label but genius to the band. The drums were muted by Daiji Okai, Yonin-Bayashi’s drummer. Akiyama decided to use Yonin-Bayashi’s legendary Fender bass. Only Hirasawa remained with his trusty Explorer guitar.
These imperfections were extremely important for the album’s sound however. The early P-Model aimed to deconstruct the Japanese economic miracle, and they made it apparent. You don’t even have to listen to the album to realize what the band is trying to tell you. The album cover itself, designed by Yuichi Hirasawa, portrays 9 humans made of white dots, each with one black dot, in increasingly weird positions. Each figure is located in a square dubbed with a profession starting with P- professor, policeman, painter, and so on. The only unbound, outside of the squares figure sports the letter P inside a black dot in place of its head.
This album cover represents the message P-Model tried to convey in their debut. People stuck inside perfectly geometrical cells, trapped in the bubble of Western promise. The recording location was not coincidental as well, as Sunshine City was mocked in the track aptly titled after the posh apartment complex. Hirasawa felt that society is moving towards complete isolation, with human interaction overlooking status being impossible to find nowadays, something that unfortunately aged really well. The album’s semi-professional, chaotic, angular style reflected these feelings. P-Model’s name itself was meant to convey a feeling of a simple commercial product. The rift between the band and the label hardened his resolve and beliefs that society only cares about money and surface level impressions.
In A Model Room is vastly architectural. As the humanoid dot figures stuck in perfect squares, with only their professions to show for it, Hirasawa saw the contemporary society as a mass of people with no ambition and character to them, which he felt was reflected in Japan’s economic boom. The aforementioned Sunshine City for example was a monument of corporate power, a vertical, self-sustainable city. It had everything one needed; apartments, offices, restaurants, leisure spots. There was no reason to leave it once you’re there. Sunshine City was also built atop Sugamo Prison, which was a political prison modeled after European prison wards. All this was highly ironic to Hirasawa, with Sunshine City being simply put, another prison.
The eponymous model room is nothing more than a perfectly predictable interior, something impossible to live in, being created just for show. These humans trapped inside model rooms on the album cover are mere components inside gentrified systems, testaments to a capitalistic fatalism of the late 20th century. This aligns closely with Michael Foucault’s concept of a disciplinary space; a space that exists to monitor and control the individuals inside it. In A Model Room’s album cover’s rooms mirror this idea.
The opening track‚’’美術館で会った人だろ Art Mania’’ (You’re the Person I Met at the Art Museum) depicts a person falling in love with someone they’ve met at an art museum, with this person ignoring them upon their second meeting. This infatuation manifests in violence turned towards the museum itself, and only later, the object of the speaker’s feelings. ‘’Art Mania’’ is one of the most iconic songs from Hirasawa’s oeuvre, and was released as a single one month before the album’s release. ‘’Health Angel’’ sounds bright and cheerful, but the subject matter is really about mass-produced junk food and modified diets, with the chorus stating ‘’overnourished since birth (…) Throw it all up / Until you’re inside out’’. ‘’Roomrunner’’ sarcastically calls the listener a ‘’superman’’, because they can engage in earthly vices, namely going to the pub and smoking, among others. Similarly, ‘’White Cigarettes’’ is about smoking cigarettes and feeling on the top of the world, not caring about the smoke getting to other people because smoking is the speaker’s right. The penultimate track, ‘’Pinky Trick’’ is a biting, aggressive piece that pokes fun at the industry and TV personalities, like Rino Katase and Yuuji Konno. The pink, so often referenced in the track, references blood, as the chorus repeats, ‘’pink is the color of blood’’. Blood is being called a phony thing from war movies, however its color is flashy and aesthetically pleasing, so society is going to pay attention to it. It’s possible to read it as a declaration from P-Model that their advent is going to begin a new era and people are going to pay attention, with pink blood flooding the streets of Tokyo, unbounding the figures in model rooms from their own contemplations, propelling them to look out of the window at the world below.
The band decided to go for a bold stylistic change; they repainted their gear in bright colors and wore nonsensical sentences and shapes on their clothing. Hirasawa, for example, sported the ‘’I AM A COKE’’ phrase on his chest. Hirasawa coined the phrase ‘acrylic pop’ to describe the album’s sound. In A Model Room was not an immediate success, but with the passage of time, it began to get recognized as one of the most influential albums in Japanese music, a precursor to the new wave movement standing next to the legendary Yellow Magic Orchestra, and a very fitting debut for P-Model.
Landsale (1980)
Released 8 months after In A Model Room, Landsale amps up the intensity and velocity of the previous album. It is more aggressive in sound, blending synth punk with new wave even deeper, showcasing the band’s rapid evolution from softer ‘acrylic pop’ to a more raw, punky sound. It is a prime example of zolo, a genre that fuses new wave with progressive rock in a bite-sized, frantic manner. The vibe of Landsale is anxious and frantic, a far cry from a sterile sound of its predecessor. This sonic evolution is going to be visible even more in their next outputs. Landsale’s leading motive is a critique of bureaucracy at large, following the nonconformist message of In A Model Room. The album’s title is a double entendre, as the Japanese title, ランドセル, can mean a school backpack, or a traitor who sells out the country (hence the English title, landsale).
The liner notes for the album recommend the listener to experience the album at maximum volume, in order to demolish the systemized apathy of a daily life, instead of treating the album as background noise. Hirasawa’s music really does want your full attention with how intricate and maximalist it is, right? Furthermore, Landsale was a big commercial success, reaching the top of the charts, the only P-Model album to do so.
However, this one is nowadays a rather overlooked album by the community. JPALT thinks it’s a great album though. Landsale has a really strong flow and perhaps even better lyrics than In A Model Room. This time around, Hirasawa wanted no external producers that would interfere in the album’s creation process, which began a long conflict between Hirasawa and the labels, something that we will touch upon later on. A lot of the album’s topics concern youth rebellion and increasing anxiety as a result of social isolation. Landsale starts off slowly with “オハヨウ” (Hello), a track that has a very similar sound to In A Model Room’s closer. It’s a surreal lovesong which diverts any expectations concerning the album’s sound. Right after that we’re thrown into a whirlwind of fast, biting punk songs. Again, the tracks themselves are short and built around a catchy chorus, a far cry from what Hirasawa and friends have been doing a year earlier, but it works so well. “ダイジョブ” (It’s Okay) is yet another highlight, a song full of anxious lyrics about being controlled and watched, not even having permission to look into someone’s eyes. The chorus, despite sounding rebellious and defiant, is actually one of acceptance: “I can’t escape the people I hate / I can’t escape these despicable people / I can’t escape, I can’t escape / But it’s okay even if I can’t do it”. Yet another masterclass in diverting expectations.
Track 5, “Touch Me”, curiously features Akiyama as the vocalist, and it’s such a great song. It’s very simple and catchy, and has a dark underlying motif. The speaker talks about his yearning to be loved or just touched by a special someone amidst society’s ignorance. This level of starvation turns ugly and physical, with the speaker vomiting blood and crawling around in pain. “ミサイル” (Missile) opens the second disc, where love is weaponized. Things like missiles or aircraft carriers are a product of the speaker’s parents and partner. These weapons of mass destruction are treated there like acts of care. The missile born from the speaker’s parent’s dreams symbolizes generational trauma or ideologies pushed onto the child; the missile then changes its destination to the parents themselves. The chorus, ‘’everyone falls in love with me’’ which later shifts to ‘’everyone hates me’’ symbolizes the hero worship, public admiration and its instability. “リトル ボーイ” (Little Boy) follows this track, and treats the same issue, namely expectations disguised as love being dangerous. Every verse begins with an important figure for a child; mother, father, teacher, friends, whose feelings are too much, to the point of combustion. The verses repeat that the boys is good at making gunpowder and hides fireworks in his randoseru, the eponymous backpack. This song depicts a quiet birth of violence inside of a child who isn’t treated like a child should, making it a chilling critique of the system. The randoseru, which can also be interpreted as the land-selling traitor, can symbolize the system and adults themselves, throwing away the future of the nation by putting too much pressure and national ideology on its children.
All these songs are even angrier than even the most violent songs on the previous record. The sound became in-your-face, the lyrics cut deep like a knife. P-Model were really unapologetic in criticizing the powers that be, and they brought sobering air, so really needed back then, when neon-lit streets fueled intoxication and delusions among society. But while Landsale is still sarcastic and turns many things into an absurd joke, the next album is as real as it gets.
Potpourri (1981)
Potpourri stands as a bridge between the early and middle P-Model periods. This album marks a deliberate walk away from electronic music which was going through a surge in popularity at the time, with Hirasawa not wanting to be seen as someone who follows current trends. In result, Potpourri became P-Model’s darkest, most manic and rebellious release. It is an album full of grit, putting guitars over synthesizers, including no wave and sound collage influences. Hirasawa’s vocals are antagonistically screamed over unsettling, chaotic instrumentals. “Different =/= Another” for example sees Hirasawa scream the verses and maniacally laugh after each sentence, only to be broken by yodeling in the middle of the song. Potpourri truly lives to its name.
Potpourri, a word originating from French, means literally a rotten pot. It is a mixture of herbs and spices, either created for aesthetic effect or for fermentation purposes. It also is a dish of Spanish origin, which is a stew with all kinds of vegetables and meat mixed together. However, the title would be most aptly interpreted with potpourri’s connotation in music theory. It comes, once again, from France, and was used to describe a musical movement which mixed high and low art, consisting of many short pieces of popular musical works. It was a popular practice until Napoleon banned the genre in 1810 for plagiarism. Potpourri’s idea was vastly criticized as frivolous, degrading classical masterpieces to short commercial jingles, ridding them of sublime. We can hear many contrasting sounds on Potpourri; electronic remnants of Landsale, punk, ska, sound collages, ideas still yet to be refined. The title is a perfect testament to P-Model’s transitional sound in 1981.
This time around, the guitars are the leading force of the album’s melodies. Synthesizers are still present, but are reduced to a background role; either to boost the atmosphere or add layers to the songs. The energy of Potpourri is primal and raw, purely kinetic, prioritizing frantic punk melodies over catchy new wave structured around a chorus. A lot of the songs on Potpourri lack the chorus altogether and consist of only verses. The lyrics, yet again, criticize the society’s drive towards conformism. This time however the critique is even sharper. It seems like P-Model has been growing increasingly tired of everyone’s shit at this point. Not only the sardonic lyrics, but the album’s sound itself encapsulates this anger. Tape manipulation, cutting, echoes that grow louder and louder invade the album. P-Model entirely distances their art from a growing technopop trend, putting out an album as removed as possible from the contemporary mainstream scene. Another feature of Potpourri’s rift from P-Model’s previous albums is the prominence of organs, which replace synths in many places.
The album kicks off with “ジャングルベッドI” (Jungle Bed I), a looping instrumental piece. The track has an incredibly smooth guitar and a groove which hypnotizes you. It was reworked by Hirasawa in 2019 for his Rubedo/Albedo – Songs For Fuji Rock Festival 2019/2021. The new version adds sung verses by Hirasawa, elevating the song to mystical levels, transforming “ジャングルベッドI” into an epic worthy of later solo Hirasawa levels. “ジャングルベッドII” (Jungle Bed II) continues the opener’s sound, and is still a catchy little tune before the album delves into real madness. Potpourri develops rapidly, with every next track being more dissonant and unsettling than the previous. Aqualife is one of the songs where the deconstruction can be heard easily, Hirasawa’s vocals are at times dissonant and echoing, sounding like recorded underwater, sometimes they’re a little too close to the microphone, making it feel like he’s speaking directly into your ear. The song ends with a pulsating groove, chimes and Hirasawa making noises akin to choking or vomiting. It definitely is a weird track meant to unsettle. Anothersmell samples laughs, crowd noises, a vast applause, a pouring liquid, and harsh noise elements on a backdrop of a yodelling man. This track ends disc one, which slowly delved into craziness that disc 2 showcases in full bloom.
Again, the tracks include chopped melodies, a vast array of samples and instruments, and Hirasawa’s manic vocal performance, something that might raise an eyebrow of someone who only heard his grandiose 90s stuff. The final 4 tracks of the project are all masterpieces. “Marvel” is driven by organs, creating a spacious atmosphere, something that the next album on this list is going to be really good at. The word ‘’marvel’’ is repeated constantly like an empty mantra, ultimately losing all meaning. The song pairs everyday objects with self-destruction, suicide by a music box, emptiness of love phrases, begging after watching the news. The bridge, which is a repeated ‘’I love you’’ appears suddenly and evokes creeps, due to it being spoken by Hirasawa and repeated by a drowning, disembodied voice right after that. “ナチュラル” (Natural) is a rather smooth song, a really needed breather in between these crazy tracks. It follows a theme of ordinariness paired with frenzy and anxiety, and juxtaposes states of offense and defense against nature and leisure. The penultimate “いまわし電話”(Disgusting Telephone) is fast, and there’s an argument to be made that this song is the closest one to being a punk track from Hirasawa’s discography. The speaker is being constantly frustrated by the telephone which keeps looping and never reaches the receiver. The caller is both free and immobile in this state of existence. The bridge repeating “I can’t help calling, I can’t help dialing” frames picking up the phone as a primal emotional reaction, most probably to loneliness and a desire to connect with someone (a motif that appears a lot in P-Model’s early days).
The album closes with the title track, “Potpourri”, one of the early highlights from Hirasawa. It’s a highly symbolic and dense track, and it encapsulates the album’s entire essence in its 3-minute runtime. The final track describes two opposing events; a funeral, and a carnival. Both are filled with people, are a way to connect (through grief/through celebration) and feature a parade (through the cemetery/the streets). These two exist at the same time in Potpourri’s cosmology; tragedy and celebration, decay and spectacle, grief and joy happening right next to each other, walking hand in hand, insequential. As the lyrics state, you wake up at a funeral, but turn around to a carnival. The acceptance of fatalism appears in verse one; ‘’I don’t resent the moon / Because the outcome was predicted from the start”, enforcing Potpourri’s driving theme, awareness without escape. Just like the looping phone call, the speaker cannot escape the funeral or the carnival; furthermore, he cannot discern between them. The sound of this track is full of urgency and unusual time signatures, Hirasawa is screaming over a droning guitar that falls on the track like acid rain.
The album cover, created by Yuichi Hirasawa, depicts what I would call the funeral and carnival happening at the same time. Sea of people without a visible end, everyone concerned with something else, becoming a gestalt of individuals removed from each other but still being largely identical. The sky is filled with grey husks, almost as if ash was falling from the sky, or large, black moths were flying around. The only colorful figure on the cover is a scared clown in the first row, looking at the people, terrified. This artwork is a great example of a notion of carnivalesque, coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, turned upside down. Carnivalesque was meant to convey a shattered social hierarchy, a state where everyone was of the same standing, where the king’s crown had the same weight as the clown’s hat. Life is both absurd and solemn at the same time, and laughter does not bring relief, it rather is a revelation of the status quo’s absurdity and acceptance of the impossibility of escape. The speaker goes mad at the very end of Potpourri, turns into an empty husk being carried by a crowd of people attending the funeral/carnival, and with his final scream, he enters a state of revelation.
Perspective (1982)
1982’s Perspective follows in Potpourri’s manic footsteps, but with a more organic sound. P-Model focused on capturing the sound’s overwhelming presence and turning it into a tangible concept, apparent by the album’s interesting recording tactics. Perspective’s famously loud drums are a product of recording every component of the drum separately, as well as recording the album from a staircase in the studio building. The guitars as well are recorded in multiple manners, with the sounds repeating sometimes. This way, the album’s sound seems distant but at the same time in the listener’s immediate vicinity. The album cover, a pink, rectangular monument standing on an empty field represents the album’s vast and thunderous sound. While In A Model Room focused on architecture and its role in trapping the individuals, Perspective treats sound as architecture itself, conveying time, space and words under one universal perspective.
Time, space and words were the guiding principles behind the album’s concept, according to Hirasawa. To break it down, time on Perspective can be heard multiple times in one second thanks to the reverb and echo created by the spatial recording and manipulated delays. The album can sometimes feel empty, different from Potpourri’s dense sound collage. This silence existing between the drums, vocals and guitars is an instrument in itself, existing in a measured space and drawing distance between the sound and the listener. This is closely related to the principle of space, apparent with the spatial recording, the distance, layering, and proximity all at once, which creates an unique listening experience, making it almost architectural in itself. The words are abstract and create a primal atmosphere of observance; they are even more abstract and at times nonsensical than ones found on Potpourri. Good examples of these would be “Coalecanth” and “うわばみ” (A Large Snake), both tracks telling about prehistoric entities; the first being coalecanth, a prehistoric fish that was thought to be extinct until it appeared in the 20th century, the second being an ancient serpent, measured to be a hundred shaku tall, being described as malevolent in nature. Hirasawa compared this track’s meaning to The Little Prince. Track 3, “Zombi”, can be tied into this narrative as well, as it is a song about, well, a zombie.
The album starts with “HEAVEN”, a larger than life track with a glitchy intro, creating a sense of deconstruction and sublime. The title itself evokes images of something incomprehensible to a human mind, and the lyrics combine everyday notions of a calendars and bus stops with abstract concepts of people drawn in a single stroke (人 is drawn with two strokes, so the lyrics evoke a sense of negligence in the creation of humanity by some force majeure), a rain of tarot cards, the bishop preaching about history at the end of a balance scale, and so on. This intro immediately creates an atmosphere of awe and confusion, as if looking at something hard to comprehend from a mere single stroke human’s perspective. “列車”follows with the sense of inevitability, like the titular train that cannot be stopped, which is speeding towards the listener. The mechanical sound of the track is a product of Hirasawa’s fascination with machinery, which is going to be found in some later albums as well. The train in this track is breaking through the ice of the North Pole and is a staple of a technological advancement, however unsettling.
“Solid Air” speeds up the tempo, and it probably is the most accessible track on the project. The song is about wandering around aimlessly, being trapped in a confusing maze and losing orientation. The spaces are described there as more liminal than physical, and they exist as patterns. Solid Air itself is an oxymoron, air shouldn’t be solid, but the dense, oppressive atmosphere of the maze the speaker is lost in makes the air feel solid, occupying the lungs. The song was later reworked and performed as a “dance version”; an even faster iteration of the track. The album ends with “Perspective II”, track occupied by a thick bassline dancing with two sets of roaring drums. The track has no chorus, rather a soft break with vocals slowly repeating “we are”, until a distorted, splitting guitar enters the scene. The voice the speaker sounds tunnels through his body, making it invasive and physical, reshaping his insides. Other immaterial things turn solid as well. The warmth becomes a sponge, the atmosphere becomes so hostile it buries the speaker. He can only hear the sound of water between him and the distant sound. This closer draws a masterful conclusion to the album, vividly showing a picture of a small human being standing face to face with something otherworldly taking shape, being far away and already invading him at the same time. And this cosmic entity is sound itself.
The aforementioned albums were rerecorded live in 1999 as a part of P-Model’s 20th anniversary celebration as Virtual Lives Vol.1, 2 & 3. We heavily recommend checking these out, as they bring an entirely new perspective on these albums. Hirasawa stated that these live albums are a faithful recreation of how P-Model sounded in the early days of their career.
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