Album:In a Model Room

In a Model Room is the debut album of Japanese band P-Model. In 2007 Rolling Stone Japan ranked it at number 52 in its list of the 100 Greatest Japanese Rock Albums of All Time and Snoozer ranked it at number 125 in its list of the 150 Greatest Albums of Japanese Rock 'n' Roll. Susumu Hirasawa re-recorded the album (except for "Sophisticated") in the style of the P-Model live shows of 1979 as Virtual Live-1 [P-Model Live at Roppongi S-Ken Studio 1979].

Background
The onset of the punk/new wave movements in the west during the mid-late '70s was revelatory for singer/guitarist Susumu Hirasawa, his older brother visual artist Yuichi and keyboardist Yasumi Tanaka: Their exposure to those kinds of music and visuals primarily via promotional videos of a large variety of bands like Sex Pistols, 999 and Kraftwerk was an experience that Tanaka said "made the scales fall off [our] eyes"; Susumu called it "the advent of a new era". Susumu's interest in new wave, in particular, came from how it was borne from the attitude towards music by its performers, who weren't part of "the flow of music" up till then. All three started writing songs in that style, and cut their waist-length hair short, alongside drummer Sadatoshi Tainaka.

Not long after that, despite never using a synthesizer in his life, Susumu passed a job interview with Akiro Kamio Arishima, a musician whose output was synthesizer-centric instrumental music in the vein of Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita. The work opportunities that resulted from that professional relationship got Susumu acquainted with the instrument and interested in its potential.

At the same time, Susumu grew unsatisfied with their progressive rock band, Mandrake. He thought their style had lost its social link and became just entertainment, while the traditional aesthetic of rock they expressed became embarrassing to him. He was also unhappy with the lack of success the band had achieved by 1978: their live shows only attracted a niche audience for national progressive rock of a few hundred people (Hirasawa estimated the total size to be around 300 people) and their only release was bit parts in an album of pop covers by Kamio's band, The Bach Revolution.

Mandrake had turned into a half-hearted band and, after declining an offer from a Victor Music Industries director, Hirasawa decided to "abort" Mandrake, characterizing it as the defeat of alchemy to commercialism. To that end, the band's final live performance, meant to be the symbolic burial of Mandrake's aborted body, was a two-part show that lasted 3 hours, with a skit between parts and the last half hour consisting entirely of new wave songs. For the skit, the lights went out and the "mad doctor" Katsuhiko Akiyama—keyboardist of the Emerson, Lake & Palmer-influenced trio Abi Kyokan (阿鼻叫喚) and occasional Mandrake roadie/skit actor—came on stage dressed in a lab coat and holding a fetus that glowed red, green and blue. After that Yuichi, while running on a treadmill also wearing a lab coat, counted to four in English and the 2nd set began, ending Mandrake.

On New Year's Day 1979, the members of the band (alongside Yuichi) held a meeting at the Hirasawa family house in Kameari to define what the new sound and image of their "project" would be, conceptually. They decided on a complete change, both musical and visual, aiming to cultivate an unthreatening image. That pivot would be employed through a "Non-Musician" approach and presentation, accentuating each member's personality and drawing upon their having jobs unrelated to the band, for their work to be seen as coming from ordinary people instead of seasoned musicians. That decision came from their observations that the kind of music big companies pushed had appeal for people who are not music fans and worked as entertainment, something that progressive rock was not capable of. This new direction was driven by their desire to "overthrow Pink Lady".

Among the influences behind this band concept, Susumu noted the American band Devo's "neither a joke nor serious" stance, since for him: "There’s no way we could be a conventional band after Devo. There’s nothing we can do about it. We made a mockery of ourselves, too". Yuichi thought it would be fun to "take the essence of nonsense from The Three Stooges, Marx Brothers, Split Enz, and the like; along with the poppy action of gamelan, yodel, Islamic religious music and so on; put them in a toy box and shake it upside down".

Bassist Tohru Akutu, obstinate in his passion towards progressive rock, decided to depart from the band, going on to work on various projects with the members of Shingetsu. Sometime after the meeting, Susumu went to Akiyama's house and asked him to take that spot, specifically because he had never played bass in his life before; part of the Non-Musician approach. Susumu was apprehensive to ask that of a prog musician; but Akiyama is also a conceptually driven person, liked the Sex Pistols and felt progressive rock had reached a cul-de-sac. So, accepting of the concept and with reassurances from Susumu that bass guitar is an easy to play instrument, he joined P-Model.

After deciding the band concept, Hirasawa and Tanaka recorded a 2-song demo at home and P-Model proceeded to distribute cassette copies to parties that might show interest. By happenstance, Hirasawa gave one to an employee of the entertainer management company [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amuse,_Inc. Amuse], which then reached another staffer on the firm, who played it over the phone to her husband, Rockin' f magazine assistant editor-in-chief Akira Katoh. Ms. Katoh offered P-Model a deal with their company, but the band wasn't interested. Mr. Katoh helped them get a record deal by inviting 8 strongly interested directors from different companies to the band's second live performance.

Of their options, P-Model chose to sign with the biggest one, Warner-Pioneer. Tomonari Sassa, the director who expressed interest in the group, was from Warner's western division, which already handled a similar band (Devo). He asked the Japanese division to take P-Model, but they didn't understand what the band was going for, so they ended up in the hands of the western division. "Bombarded" with overseas new wave labels, they went with Warner itself, since it was the most "major", they had no experience going overseas or good grasp of English and their goals centred around the national pop music environment.

With half an album's worth of music already written, the band put out both a debut single and album with relative agility. From the band's formation in 1 January to their debut live on 16 March, recording sessions throughout May and June, debut single release on 25 July and ultimately the album's release on 25 August, it took them a mere 235 days to do what Mandrake had been unable to in 5 years.

Conception
The lyrics of In a Model Room reflect the changes Tokyo was going through as Japan's economy surged. P-Model, who with the exception of Tainaka were all Tokyo natives, felt displaced in the metropolis, and that it lacked a shared culture and anything interesting to do. This alienation came from the population influx from elsewhere, and a development the group was acutely aware of: the government's attempts throughout the decade to purge subcultures (at the time commonly thought of as disgusting and consisting of only bad people) from the special wards to make them "wholesome". Having seen the transformation Shinjuku went through (to Hirasawa, it simply became a city for drunkards), the process that Ikebukuro was undergoing during the band's formation—namely, the construction of the Sunshine City complex at the centre of what they considered an unrefined town—made them think Tokyo had reached its end. That led them to put a sense of hopelessness akin to that found in George Orwell's 1984 in the album.

Unlike other technopop bands of the time, which sung mostly English lyrics, P-Model wrote only one song entirely in the language, with their others in Japanese. Every song in the album contain direct social commentary, highlighting issues in people's mindsets and behaviors. The band agreed to only write songs with whole tones; while Tanaka easily wrote bars full of them, Hirasawa was only able to muster "Art Mania". They ended up with a tendency for complex compositions and unusual time signatures.

The instrumentation is conventional for '70s new wave: the standard punk ensemble of guitar, bass and drums augmented with a combo organ and a variety of synthesizers, almost all of them monophonic; mostly performed with hyperactive energy. Hirasawa's vocal style in particular went through a drastic change: the low-volume singing of Mandrake gave way to powerful yelping for P-Model. Tanaka thinks that happened due to him going from a reluctant lead vocalist to a willing one; Hirasawa has remarked that he could only sing that way upon following the approach of the Sex Pistols and their strong punkish touch.

The P-Model sound originated from "playful" experimentation: synthesizers at the time were thought to be instruments of contemplative sound, so Hirasawa wanted to hear what they'd sound like when put through distortion, sound decay and noise. In particular, an unique blipping noise Tanaka got out of a Maxi-Korg 800DV, named "Musical Stapler" (ミュージカル・ホッチキス), came from this experimentation.

A Roland CR-68 drum machine does simultaneous counterpoint beats to a standard drum kit. The CR-68 is used in five tracks—"Art Mania", "Roomrunner", "Sophisticated", "Kameari Pop" and "Art Blind"—respectively, through the preset rhythm patterns "beguine", "samba", "bossa nova", "slow rock" and "foxtrot". In all cases, the "balance" knob was turned left to remove the patterns' cymbals, except for "Roomrunner"/samba (which kept all parts of the preset) and "Kameari Pop"/slow rock (in which only the cymbal was used). Hirasawa considers the Musical Stapler and the CR-68 rhythms to be the defining elements of the band's sound, at the time. Hirasawa attempted to give a completely inorganic sound to the album.

At first they called this style, a blend of cold mechanical instrumentation and direct satirical messaging, Acrylic Pop (アクリル・ポップ). The term was coined by Hirasawa, who thought it was completely incompatible with the Mandrake style and material. In contrast, Akiyama didn't think it too radical of a shift, finding the material comparable to Sacred Songs, an album by pop singer Daryl Hall produced by prog guitarist Robert Fripp. Since the songs they were working on were a counterpoint to the cultureless Tokyo that was being built on top of the place's original culture, Hirasawa later decided to call it Joban Line Pop (常磐線ポップ), after the railway that services the area he grew up in (and still lived in at the time), Kameari.

P-Model's style has been compared multiple times, both at the time and over the decades, to one of their contemporaries, XTC. Altough he sees similarities between each band's guitar and organ sounds, Hirasawa personally thinks that Bill Nelson's Red Noise were the closest to what the band developed regarding overall sound, and that the way how they identified as a musical unit was more similar to the views held by 999 and Métal Urbain. Other unidentified member(s) found the comparison disrespectful to XTC, since they "have more variation". Akiyama thinks the two bands have close worldviews, referring to "that kind of objectivity between the world and ourselves, that cynicism, and so on".

Production
As In a Model Room would mark the first time he would go into a professional recording studio, Hirasawa wanted to work with an outside producer, preferably someone with experience and who understood what the band was going for. P-Model thought they were the only ones in Japan making their kind of new wave music, until they saw Plastics live at S-Ken Studio; both Hirasawa and Tanaka were stunned by their performance, and by how their electronics also sounded distorted. After a Plastics show at Yaneura early in the year ended, Hirasawa approached keyboardist Masahide Sakuma, asked him to produce P-Model and handed over a copy of their demo.

Plastics hadn't yet made an album at the time, but Sakuma was also the bassist of Yonin-Bayashi, the most commercially successful progressive rock group from Tokyo; in the previous 4 years, he worked on 3 group-produced albums of theirs. The formal offer (negotiations with Plastics' manager and Sakuma signing a contract ) came months after that show; Sakuma was so impressed with the demo that he immediately agreed to produce. He was swiftly trusted by the band. Hirasawa, who once described him as "unlike any other kind of musician or industry person; an honest man who acted with a life-sized air of cleanliness", felt a strong sense of sympathy since they were going through similar stylistic changes, and that his presence brought a sense of security.

Recording sessions started, not long after securing Sakuma, at Sunrise, a small studio in the immediate vicinity of Sunshine City. The 2 songs on the debut single were completed first, then they worked on the rest of the album; the bulk of it was recorded at Sunrise.

Despite their respect for one another, Hirasawa clashed constantly with Sakuma (at times backed by Warner and engineer Makoto Furukawa) over P-Model's equipment: Hirasawa believed its grittiness was an important differentiator between Joban Line Pop and the sophisticated fashionable city sounds they positioned themselves against, Sakuma thought it all sounded bad. One day, he brought a Fender Jazz Bass he used with Yonin-Bayashi to be played instead of the band's Greco Suzi Quatro Model; Akiyama liked its sound and used it for the album. Yonin-Bayashi drummer Daiji Okai was hired to help tune the band's kit, which he did, over the course of 1 day, muting the drums with tissue paper to sound good.

The Yamaha YC-10 combo organ was a source of daily arguments: The band chose it—bought with money they acquired by selling off the pricey Hammond organ used by Mandrake—for the clicking it makes every time a key is pressed; the production wanted to take the noise out of the mix, and at one point tried to rent an "expensive keyboard", which the group refused adamantly. They attempted to to remove the clicking via equalization, but other members would alter the settings while Furukawa—who didn't notice the changes—looked at Hirasawa. Ultimately, the YC-10 was run through a phaser, which rendered the noise either unlistenable or drastically softened. The only instrument Sakuma was unable to change was the guitar: He considered borrowing a Les Paul or Telecaster for the recording, but Hirasawa would only use his Explorer.

The Non-Musician ethos lead to some peculiar occurrences during the sessions. Sakuma & Okai played parts of songs by happenstance at separate occasions, on both times highlighting a drastic lack of skill from P-Model's rhythm section. Hirasawa wanted one song to have the voice of kids in it, so the band went to a McDonald's and asked 3-4 high school girls there to sing on the album.

The band had planned for In a Model Room to have a pop finish, but the result was more punk than they expected. While the group maintained an amicable relationship with Sakuma after the album was finished, they never worked with an outside producer again, and the process marked the beginning of an 8-year-long struggle against audio engineers by Hirasawa.

Visuals
To create an unthreatening image, P-Model based its visuals in bright colors, continuing the Mandrake tradition of painting instruments, as well as changing their clothing. It was decided that the band's name would be changed to something that evoked the new development of a mass-produced industrial good, a fake product model. The letter "P" (ピー) was picked for the name because it sounds ridiculous. Yuichi produced "P" badges, which the members wore on live shows as well as the photoshoot for the album. Hirasawa wore plaques with intentless sentences on them to feign safeness while giving a sense of discomfort. Warner tried to push the band into adopting 2 visuals: a self-proposed one deemed to be too close to what Devo was doing and one proposed by a stylist from an・an magazine would make them look like paratroopers; they rejected both of them.

For the cover art, Warner proposed an image of the band members' eyes shining in the darkness, but they were convinced Yuichi had to do it. The front cover features 9 humanoid figures made out of 18 white circles and 1 black circle. One "default" figure (whose black circle encloses a white "P") stands in a solid yellow background at top left, while the other 8 are encased in pink "rooms" (6×6 square grids), each marked by a profession in English that starts with the letter "P". Yuichi's first draft of the front cover featured 16 figures, with the bottom right one made of mostly black circles with 1 white one instead; it was rejected due to copyright issues.

The back cover reverses the pink/yellow background color scheme, has rooms defined by abstract concepts in English that start with the letter "P", and features photos of the band members in 2 sets of colorful clothing and odd poses. They all wear a "P" badge and some kind of eyewear, either sunglasses or swimming goggles. Only one photo features a member with uncovered eyes: Hirasawa, in the paranoia room, wearing 5 "P" badges and a sentence plaque with "I AM A COKE" written on it. A group shot stands in a solid pink background at bottom right, with the word "people" under it in large font.

Track listing
2 other songs were considered for the album: The Hirasawa-penned "Alien" (異邦人) and the Tanaka piece "White Shoes" (ホワイト・シューズ). The former, at times part of Mandrake setlists, was considered too heavy and "not the sound you want out of a pink album"; it was later recorded, with new parts by Tanaka, for Landsale. The latter was first publicly released as BGM for the end credits of the Photon-1 video.

Personnel

 * P-Model - production, arrangements
 * Susumu Hirasawa - vocals, guitar (H.S. Anderson Explorer A5), synthesizers (Maxi-Korg 800DV, Yamaha CS-10), drum machine (Roland CR-68), vocoder (Korg VC-10), jacket design
 * Yasumi Tanaka - combo organ (Yamaha YC-10), synthesizers (Maxi-Korg 800DV, Roland SH-3, Korg MS-20), drum machine (Roland CR-68), sequencer (Roland CSQ-100), backing vocals
 * Sadatoshi Tainaka - drums (Yamaha kit with Pearl snare)
 * Katsuhiko Akiyama - bass (Fender Jazz Bass), synthesizers (Roland SH-3, Korg MS-20), backing vocals


 * additional performers
 * Sunshine City Gals (listed under special thanks) - backing vocals on "For Kids"


 * technical
 * Masahide Sakuma - "Switchist", production
 * Makoto Furukawa - engineering, remixing
 * Kozo Kenmochi, Kenji Konno, Ryuichi Suzuki - assistant engineering
 * Daiji Okai (listed under special thanks) - drum tuning


 * visuals
 * Yuichi Hirasawa (also listed under special thanks) - art direction
 * Hideki Namai - photography


 * operations
 * Tomonari Sassa - direction (A&R)


 * Special Thanks to
 * Akira Katoh (credited as "Hisaaki Katoh"), Nobumasa Uchida, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Ms. Shirota

Release history

 * "Roomrunner" is included on the GET THE PUNK -J PUNK & NEW WAVE 1972～1991- various artists compilation.
 * "Art Mania" is included on the ROCK is LOFT　-Purple Disc- ～SHINJUKU LOFT 30th Anniversary～, TECHNOLOID -JAPANESE 80's NEW WAVE SAMPLER-, Rock NIPPON～Selected by Hiroshi Tsuchiya, KING SONGS of NEW WAVE and SAKUMA DROPS compilation albums.
 * The album's singles were reissued on CD on paper sleeves to replicate their original packaging with the band's other Warner-Pioneer released singles as part of the Tower Records exclusive Warner Years Singles Box box set in 2012.