Chris Mosdell

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Chris Mosdell

Chris Mosdell
Born Flag of England Gainsborough, England

Occupation Lyricist

Chris Mosdell (born 9 November 1949 in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire) is an award-winning British lyricist, poet, and author, as well as a composer, vocalist, and illustrator, based in Tokyo, Japan, and Boulder, Colorado, USA.

Known for his pioneer lyrical work for a wide gamut of Japanese musicians and artists––he has been referred to as the “Lafcadio Hearn of Lyrics”[1]––he is especially known for his partnership with Yellow Magic Orchestra and his collaboration with the legendary Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa. As the innovator of VISIC (visual music), a tripartite union of lyrics, visuals and music, his solo album Equasian melded his scientific background into a musical framework, and his Oracles of Distraction, a set of poetic cards set to musical coordinates, further expanded his lyrical idiom. The musician Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote “When I read his lyrics I see him in a high school chemistry laboratory making Molotov cocktails––his eyes lucid, blue and very clear.”[2] He has written lyrics for Eric Clapton, Sarah Brightman, and Boy George; worked with the West African kora player Toumani Daibate; the avant-garde calligraphy artist Juichi Yoshikawa; and penned the verse dance drama Amaterasu, The Resurrection of Radiance, that was performed with the City Ballet of London at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (2001).

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early Lyrical Life

Mosdell left London for Tokyo in 1976 after completing a B.Sc. (specializing in microbiology) from the University of Nottingham and withdrawing from a Master Degree in pathology at the University of Exeter after realizing his scientific leanings were at odds with his poetic interests. Arriving in Japan he became a script-writer for NHK (National Television Company of Japan), a host of numerous radio programs, a reporter for Radio Europe, and a reader of the World Service News for BBC radio broadcasts. His plays The Sound Seller (1977) and The Star Polisher (1978) were both produced for NHK and his collected television scripts, Laugh Out Loud (Asahi Publishing), were published in 1979––an edition that is still a popular text in Japanese universities today.

In 1977, a series of Mosdell’s poems, published in the Japan Times, came to the attention of Yukihiro Takahashi, who was, at the time, the drummer for the internationally-known Sadistic Mika Band (who had recently toured England with Roxy Music). Takahashi asked to use the poems as the lyrical base for pop singer Rajie, whose album he was producing. Shortly afterward, Sadistic Mika Band disbanded, and some of the remaining members, including Takahashi, formed Sadistics as a follow-up act, for which Mosdell proceeded to write the lyrics to the popular “Crazy Kimono Kids”, and “Tokyo Taste” for their self-named Sadistics release (1977).

Takahashi continued to be a prime collaborator for Mosdell, inviting him to participate as the lyricist in his next musical endeavor, Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) formed in 1978 along with Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto. His best-known YMO songs include “Behind the Mask”, “Solid State Survivor”, “Nice Age”, “Insomnia”, “La Femme Chinoise” and “Citizens of Science”, from the albums Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978), Solid State Survivor (1979), and ×∞ Multiplies (1980)––lyrics envisaging a socially inert world, digitized and impersonal, and controlled by a forceful hidden authority within a landscape, essentially Japanese, but tinged with Chinese motifs.

The popularity and international influence of YMO propelled Mosdell into becoming a sought-after lyricist for other Japanese recording artists, as well as continuing as the central lyricist for the Yellow Magic Orchestra live album Public Pressure (1982). During this time Mosdell wrote chart-topping lyrics for other artists, including, among many others, Sandii and the Sunsetz, Sheena and the Rokkets, and Imitation.

Continuing his friendship and collaboration with the songwriters behind YMO, Mosdell also worked with these artists on solo endeavors, composing the bulk of the lyrics for Yukihiro Takahashi’s well-received Murdered By The Music solo LP, and the international synthpop club hit single, “War Head” with Ryuichi Sakamoto. “War Head”, originally entitled “Night Boys Pick Up Some Heat”, was a song penned exclusively for the grand opening of the Roppongi nightclub Lexington Queen, but was favored by Sakamoto to such an extent that he chose to remix the song, with Mosdell performing vocals for the first time since YMO’s “Citizens Of Science”, in a rap-styled lyrical rant.

The breadth of Mosdell’s lyrical experimentation during this period led to him embarking on his own solo recording. This resulted in the influential 1982 release Equasian, an album noted for its use of global ethnic sounds pre-dating the popularity of World Music. It was also the first of Mosdell’s efforts employing his visual lyrical and compositional technique, VISIC, which he used as the compositional basis for numerous other musical works. The release of Equasian was showcased as an audio-visual/multimedia experience through live performances and a VISIC Exhibition at the Gallery Harajuku in Tokyo. For all its experimentation and relative obscurity, the record’s relevance and popularity has continued up through recent times, being reissued as a gate-fold, full-color CD package by Sony in 2003.

During a period of increasing international collaborations, Mosdell traveled to Los Angeles to work with pop singer Boy George. They worked together on two single cuts (“Fireboy Meets His Match” and “All Prayers are Answered”) for a Japanese shoju television commercial that, although released for a few weeks, was suddenly withdrawn after the singer’s brush with heroin. In the same city, pop icon Michael Jackson recorded a cover of YMO’s “Behind the Mask” for inclusion on his legendary 1981 Thriller album, but for reasons that are disputed depending on who tells the story, the song was eventually not included on the album, which went on to become the biggest-selling pop record of all time. The Mosdell-Sakamoto-Jackson version was later picked up by Eric Clapton, however, who recorded it for his August (album) album, released in 1986.

“Sticky Music”, one of Mosdell’s chart-toppers for Sandii and the Sunsetz, rose to the Number 3 spot on the Australian Top 40 pop chart in 1983, and his lyrics to date were published in Ink Music: The Collected Lyrics of Chris Mosdell. His popularity as a Tokyo-based English writer also catapulted him into writing for numerous Japanese television commercials, often collaborating with former Sadistic Mika Band lead vocalist and guitarist Kazuhiko Kato.

[edit] Alternative Lyrical Landscapes

Mosdell delved into alternative lyrical dimensions when he penned the lyrics to Shake the Whole World To Its Foundations, a work that has evolved through multiple permutations, from a mixed Japanese-Western orchestral setting, to an electronic techno version. It was eventually published in its entirety in book form in 2001 (Shichosha Publishing), together with the work of the experimental calligraphy artist Joichi Yoshikawa. Its first iteration, however, was written to reflect the rhythmical influence of the African continent and recorded by the West African kora player Toumani Daibate for his 1992 release of the same name. Based on the oral poetry of the Ainu from Hokkaidō, the northern-most island of Japan, Mosdell wrote a series of chants (eventually numbering one thousand) whereby, instead of having a fixed lyrical base to a song, the musician/composer could dip into a pool of “chants” and select those favored for the composition––this eventually leading to infinite lyrical variations within a fixed musical format.

Continuing this method of lyrical composition the solo project, Squawk: The Song of the Violinnet was embarked upon, though following the financial decline of the record company, all of the recorded songs were never distributed. However the effort did result in the lyricist’s collaboration with the American artists Jore Park and Wylci Fables, who were commissioned to produce enormous "birdhead boy" art renderings depicting the characters described in the epic work. Using a unique painting technique similar to batik but on waxed Japanese washi paper, vast stain glass-like art pieces were created––a method that would be used to great effect in Mosdell’s next project.

In 1988 he collaborated with the legendary Japanese poet, Shuntaro Tanikawa, on a deck of cards created in the omikuji fortune-telling tradition of Shinto shrines. The Oracles of Distraction have sometimes been likened to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, however, rather than being instructional are instead intended to distract the reader with randomly juxtaposed images and sound. Containing 77 cards, Mosdell wrote a “distractive” poem for each “oracle” in English, while Tanikawa wrote the reverse side in Japanese. Jore Park and Wylci Fables created an accompanying 77 washi-painted panels. Musician Yu Imai then worked alongside other studio performers with Mosdell to create 77 audio sketches utilizing Mosdell’s VISIC compositional method. The combined efforts were consolidated into a CD box set of text, audio and visual imagery intended to be used in conjunction, in order to create the combined distracting effect. Users were instructed to randomly select a numbered card to read and view, and to simultaneously play a track selection from the CD of the same number.

Mosdell wrote within the package:

"The Oracles, as the title implies, were written and composed to be distractive. But I still like to think of them as exultations. Each card in this set has the properties of an allotrope: a compound ideogram having an interchangeable voice dependent on its musical frame. Similar to their Chinese counterparts, these ideograms are written from a pictorial base. The ontology is a small drawing, the sight given to the word.
"Musically, the Oracles are views over seventy-seven landscapes (for it is how music is viewed as much as it is listened to that interests me). The music dictates the tone of the word and likewise the images of the word can have an emotive influence on how the music is accepted. The music can quietly complement the ideograms or conversely be quite incongruous. In a constructive sense the Oracles are given to misguide. Looked upon otherwise and their function is misunderstood. They are not directives. They are not instructional. They sing in their own language.
"I have never really considered the cards in the vein of prophecy but rather think of them as simultaneous views in two languages, (Tanikawa san’s beautiful and confronting images striding off at a marvelous tangent from my own) separate in their perspectives and supported by their musical accompaniments, having a refractive nature like light entering water. They have always been intended to defy our own logic, break what we see as method. They are to turn the head, as if glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Of course, the Oracles lend themselves quite easily to interpretation but the idea of prophecy is solely the prerogative of those who might believe in it.
"On a practical note, select a card(s) from the shuffled pack and program your compact disc player for the appropriate number(s). Independent of this the random ‘shuffle’ selector can be used on your player to arbitrarily select a musical frame for a pre-chosen card. This allows seventy-seven scores for a single ideogramic reading. I have also tried to arrange the musical side of the Oracles into a listenable flow so as the linked pieces lead the listener/viewer on some, hopefully adventurous, voyage amongst the islands."

In the midst of Mosdell’s relocating to Paris and commuting to Japan, The Oracles of Distraction was presented as an installation at La Foret Museum in Harajuku, Tokyo. Sony developed a unique sound system for the show enabling visitors to enter wearing wireless headphones and walk under motion-triggered canopies that would then beam random selections of audio to the headphones in accompaniment to the text selections highlighted on towering, illuminated paintings by Park and Fables, in keeping with the intention of the project’s theme. The museum was designed in the form of a Shinto shrine, with attendants dressed in traditional regalia, and visitors selected their own personal oracle from among 77 different entrance tickets.

If Tokyo had been the defining influence on the lyricist’s frenetic writing style, his next venture might prove to be its antithesis. In 2000 Mosdell was invited by the Institute of Tagore Studies and Research at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal for a six month sojourn at India’s “Abode of Peace”. Established by the Nobel Prize winning poet Rabindranath Tagore as an experimental school for literature and dance, the lyricist gave performances and under the spell of the lush and colorful environment wrote a new series of poems based on the 108 appellations of Krishna and the tripartite mystical utterance of the Upanisads. Entitled Thirty-Three Billion Songs on the Road of Reincarnations: The Santiniketan Sutra (after the number of gods in the Hindu pantheon) the work is in stark contrast to his Tokyo output, and shows a more subdued, becalmed side of the lyricist. The book was published by Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters in 2008.

[edit] The Ink Of Tokyo

In 1988 Mosdell’s LAA . . . The Dangerous Opera Begins was published (Soseisha)––a vast narrative poem in seven acts based on a theatrical structure. Influenced by the Japanese poet Yoshimasu Gozo and his technique of writing whilst walking, Mosdell envisaged a spectacular prima donna, wearing huge eccentric headdresses, whose voice changed with each new outfit in which she appeared. Gozo wrote that Mosdell’s work was “The Ink of Tokyo––beautiful, beautiful, this spirit, this sea.”[3]

In 1989 Writing the Riot Act in the Illiterate Hour: New and Selected Lyrics (Shichosha) was published––an edition including additional poems from five renowned Japanese poets (Shuntaro Tanikawa, Yoshimasu Gozo, Kazuko Shiraishi, Hiromi Ito and Makoto Oka) who gave their own personal poetic interpretations of Mosdell’s lyrics.

During this time he again teamed up with Yukihiro Takahashi to write songs for the albums Ego (1988) and Broadcast from Heaven (1990), garnering further public attention. He was also commissioned to write the theme song for the Social Democratic Party of Japan for the 1990 political election, resulting in the single “One World”, an ensemble piece featuring an assortment of vocalists and session musicians.

[edit] Anime and Visual Interpretations

In the early 1990s the lyricist began a foray into anime soundtrack collaborations with the composer Yoko Kanno, internationally known for her work in this field. Their partnership resulted in songs for the soundtracks to Ghost in the Shell, Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, RahXephon, and Wolf's Rain. Together they also wrote “Dreams in a Pie” for the software game Napple Tale and worked on songs (“Another Grey Day in the Big Blue World” and “Kingfisher Girl”) for Maaya Sakamoto, a celebrity singer in the anime arena.

Mosdell again collaborated with avant garde calligraphy artist Juichi Yoshikawa, producing one of his most enduring bi-lingual publications, The Erotic Odes: A Pillow Book. Erotic shunga woodcut prints from the Edo Era (Tokyo 1603-1868) were used to illuminate the 48 (the number of sexual positions in traditional Japanese society) haiku-like poems, as were new creations by Yoshikawa. Shuntaro Tanikawa, together with Rie Terada, translated the poems and the shunga themselves were selected from a private collection of Tanikawa’s famous philosopher father Tetsuzo Tanikawa. The full-color edition, originally published by Libroport in 1997, is slated for a 2008 re-printing. Yoshikawa and Mosdell further collaborated on the full text printing of Shake the Whole World To Its Foundations.

Continuing to pen lyrics for motion picture soundtracks, Mosdell next wrote “From the Ruins of Your Beautiful Body” for the theme song to French film director/screenwriter Marc Rigaudis’ award-winning adaptation of his short story, “She Was So Pretty”. The film featured Nana Okumura, former Miss Universe Japan 1998, and dealt with the emotional subject of ijime, the cultural issue of bullying in Japanese schools.

[edit] Installation and Live Performance

Having already expanded his textual work into imagistic form for his Oracles Of Distraction installation, in 1999 Mosdell was tapped by producer Shozo Tsurumoto, already familiar with Mosdell's VISIC work, to convey through sonic settings the alternative historical view set forth by author Graham Hancock in his best-selling book Fingerprints of the Gods. Utilizing the gallery setting once more, the project saw the scaled recreation of Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, and the Great Pyramid of Giza, among many other historical monuments, within an installation environment--underscored by what Art Director Kevin Hamilton coined “audio poems,” sonically recreating peak events within the timeline—amounting to an usual audio-only project for a lyricist. The installation series was featured in Tokyo and Osaka, and again paired Mosdell with long-time musical collaborator Yu Imai.

By the next year Mosdell relocated his secondary home from Paris to Boulder, Colorado, and began a series of spoken word performances that resulted in his being awarded the Grand Prize for Poetry at the Colorado Festival of Literature, and a distribution deal to compile his lyrical works into a new publication, Splatterhead (Emerson’s Eye, 2000). Extending the format of the poetry reading to include live audio/video mixing with visual artist David Fodel and techno DJ E23, Mosdell toured to various cities up through 2001 with his “tongue-drum delirium” ensemble, Splatterhead & The Oblivion Brotherhood. The trio later released a techno version of “Shake The World” as a single for the politically-inspired electronic music compilation Polyphonic Voices Of Digital Dissent.[4]

Returning to Tokyo, Mosdell was one of a hundred local artists invited to contribute artifacts to the Millennium Time Capsule, an event held at the Laforet Museum, Harajuku. Each selected artist was given a time capsule and asked to place in it representations of their work that best depicted the city of Tokyo at the turn of the 20th Century. The lyricist chose his notebooks, swarming with page after page of densely written descriptions of his Eastern odyssey, and a selection of his pens that he had used for numerous lyrical projects––his alien embossed pen that he wrote his Thrills in Voidville series with, and his “nude nib,” a pen carved in the figure of a woman that he used whilst composing The Erotic Odes.

Mosdell’s passion for performance next turned to the theater when he was commissioned to script the theatrical scenario for an updated Anglo-Japanese variation of the ancient Japanese epic, Amaterasu. Entitled The Sun Goddess: The Resurrection of Radiance, the masked dance drama was performed as part of the “Japan Year In Britain” celebration, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in May, 2001. In collaboration with designer/director Tomio Mohri (famous for his Super Kabuki costume designs, and as a fashion designer with his mentor, Issey Miyake), choreographer Cathy Marston and the City Ballet of London, taiko drummer Miyuki Ikeda, super-model/actress Sayako Yamaguchi, and composer Kazuhiko Kato (of Sadistic Mika Band fame), the play was a modernized adaptation of the ancient Japanese epic, which depicts the origins of music and dance. Written in blank verse with a British cast of Shakespearean actors, it employed techniques from the traditional stage of Kabuki to innovative choreography from contemporary dance, and melded into the stage setting other aspects of contemporary media.

By 2006, to coincide with the publication of City Of Song, his epic depiction of characters from the twenty-three kus, or wards, of Tokyo, Mosdell had updated his spoken word performances to include a full mixed-culture ensemble, The Incendiary Orchestra. Featuring renowned koto composer/performer, Michiyo Yagi, violinist Edgar Kautzner, tabla percussionist Andy Matzukami, and translator Rie Terada, the live performances were held in various locations around Tokyo, and were captured on film as part of the documentary production detailing Mosdell’s artistic history, entitled Ink Music: In The Land Of The Hundred-Tongued Lyricist, slated for release in 2008.

[edit] Selected discography

[edit] Lyricist, Yellow Magic Orchestra

  • "Behind the Mask" (Solid State Survivor, 1979)
  • "Citizens Of Science" (Multiplies, 1980)
  • "Insomnia" (Solid State Survivor, 1979)
  • "La Femme Chinoise" (Yellow Magic Orchestra, 1978; Public Pressure, 1980; After Service, 1981)
  • "Nice Age" (Multiplies, 1980)
  • "Radio Junk" (Public Pressure, 1980)
  • "Solid State Survivor" (Solid State Survivor, 1979)

[edit] Lyricist, Yukihiro Takahashi

  • "Blue Colour Worker" (Murdered By The Music, 1980)
  • "The Core Of Eden" (Murdered By The Music, 1980)
  • "Murdered By The Music" (Murdered By The Music, 1980)
  • "Radioactivist" (Murdered By The Music, 1980)
  • "School Of Thought" (Murdered By The Music, 1980)
  • "Drip Dry Eyes" (Neuromantic, 1981)
  • "Erotic" (Ego, 1988)
  • "Yes" (Ego, 1988)
  • "Forever Bursting Into Flame" (Broadcast From Heaven, 1990)
  • "The Sensual Object Dance" (Broadcast From Heaven, 1990)
  • "360 Degrees" (Broadcast From Heaven, 1990)

[edit] Lyricist, Ryuichi Sakamoto

  • "Behind the Mask" (Behind the Mask, 1980)
  • "Lexington Queen" [a.k.a. "Night Boys Pick Up Some Heat"] (The Arrangement, 1981)
  • "War Head" (Field Work - Ryuichi Sakamoto Collection: 1981-1987, 1987)

[edit] Lyricist, Eric Clapton

  • "Behind the Mask" (August, 1986)

[edit] Lyricist, Sarah Brightman

  • "When Firebirds Cry" (Harem, 2003)

[edit] Lyricist, Sandii & The Sunsetz

  • "Idol Era" (Eating Pleasure, 1980)
  • "Zoot Kook" (Eating Pleasure, 1980)
  • "Bongazuna" (Heat Scale, 1981)
  • "The Eve Of Adam" (Heat Scale, 1981)
  • "Heat Scale" (Heat Scale, 1981)
  • "Dreams Of Immigrants" (Immigrants, 1982)
  • "Sticky Music" (Sticky Music 7", 1983)
  • "Drip Dry Eyes" (Viva Lava Liva, 1984)

[edit] Lyricist, Sheena & The Rokkets

  • "Stiff Lips" (Sheena & The Rokkets, 1979)
  • "Radio Junk" (Synkuu Pack, 1979)
  • "Dead Guitar" (Channel Good, 1980)
  • "Japanic" (Japanik, 2008)
  • "Planet Guitar" (Japanik, 2008)

[edit] Lyricist, Maaya Sakamoto

  • "The Garden Of Everything" (Single Collection, 1999)
  • "Another Grey Day In The Big Blue World" (Easy Listening, 2001)
  • "Kingfisher Girl" (Shonen Alice, 2003)

[edit] Solo

  • Equasian (1982 Alfa / 2003 Sony)
  • The Oracles Of Distraction (1988 Midi Records)
  • Fingerprints Of The Gods (2002 Consipio)

[edit] Vocalist

  • "Citizens Of Science" (YMO, Multiplies)
  • "War Head" (Ryuichi Sakamoto, Solo Works)
  • "Shake The World" (Splatterhead & The Oblivion Brotherhood, Polyphonic Voices Of Digital Dissent)

[edit] Film Score Lyrics

[edit] Selected publications

[edit] Author

  • Laugh Out Loud (Asahi Publishing, 1979)
  • Ink Music: The Collected Lyrics of Chris Mosdell (Ink Music Inc., 1985)
  • LAA . . . The Dangerous Opera Begins (Soseisha, 1988)
  • Writing the Riot Act in the Illiterate Hour: New and Selected Lyrics with Shuntaro Tanikawa, Yoshimasu Gozo, Kazuko Shiraishi, Hiromi Ito and Makoto Oka (Shichosha, 1989)
  • The Oracles of Distraction with Shuntaro Tanikawa (Seidosha, 1991)
  • The Erotic Odes: A Pillow Book with Juichi Yoshikawa (calligraphy), and Shuntaro Tanikawa and Rie Terada (translators) (Libroport, 1997)
  • Shake the Whole World To Its Foundations with Juichi Yoshikawa (calligraphy), and Rie Terada (translator) (Shichosha Publishing, 2001)
  • Splatterhead: The Songlines Of Chris Mosdell (Emerson's Eye, 2001)
  • City Of Song: The Incendiary Arias (Edokko Editions, 2006)
  • Thirty-Three Billion Songs on the Road of Reincarnations: The Santiniketan Sutra (Sahitya Akademi, 2008)

[edit] Awards

  • Gold Prize for Lyrics, Tokyo Festival of Music, 1984
  • The Yuki Hayashi-Newkirk Poetry Prize, 1987
  • Grand Prize for Poetry, Colorado Festival of Literature, 2000
  • EVVY Children’s Book Award for Humor, 2004

[edit] References

  1. ^ TAB Event - Chris Mosdell and the Incendiary Orchestra
  2. ^ Chris Mosdell : Lyricist
  3. ^ Metropolis [Tokyo] In Person: Chris Mosdell
  4. ^ CommTom :: Polyphonic Voices

[edit] External links

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