releases starting with 2005's Sweet Spot. Regularly selling out major venues in their native country, Yura Yura Teikoku signed to the tiny indie Mesh Key Records for their U.S. Produced by You Ishihara of the bands White Heaven and the Stars (of which Kamekawa was also a member), the album became an unexpected mainstream pop success that the band built on with 2001's Yura Yura Teikoku III. In 1997, the band replaced Yoshida with Ichiro Shibata and made the leap from indie labels to Sony Music Entertainment, which released 1998's 333. The band began as a psychedelic garage-rock act influenced by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, but the musical chemistry Sakamoto established with Kamekawa allowed Yura Yura Teikoku to incorporate many other styles, including disco and electronic music, into their sound. In 1989, he formed Yura Yura Teikoku ("the Wobbling Empire"), initially playing with a friend from junior high before working with two of his fellow students at Tama Art University, drummer Atsushi Yoshida and bassist Chio Kamekawa. On later albums, Sakamoto used the fundamentals of his style - a summery vibe, slippery steel guitars - to create distinct moods ranging from the deceptively mellow post-apocalyptic commentary of 2014's Let's Dance Raw to the nostalgic reflections of 2022's Like a Fable.īorn in Osaka, Japan in 1967, Sakamoto was an artistic child who immersed himself in drawing and painting before picking up the guitar when he was 14. His 2012 debut album How to Live with a Phantom offered just that, blending together sophisticated pop sounds from around the world with a hyperreal clarity that echoed the genre-mashing playfulness of the Shibuya-kei movement as well as Sakamoto's own psychedelic roots. Over the course of two decades, the Tokyo-based trio became a household name in Japan, but when they disbanded in 2010, the singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and painter/designer was ready for a change. As a solo artist, Shintaro Sakamoto draws from breezy soft-rock, disco, reggae, and bossa nova - a far cry from the towering psych-rock of his former band Yura Yura Teikoku.
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