Today, I would like to discuss the new album One-Hit Wonder by Suzuki Matsuo, a duet consisting of Kiyonori Matsuo and Keiichi Suzuki, most famous for being the founder of the legendary Moonriders.

You can listen to the whole album here. It would be hard for me to "review" this album, because it wears its joys and sweetnesses on its surface. I could not say a single thing about it that you wouldn't think of just by listening.

Hell, you could even just look at the album cover and come away with a decent approximation of the experience:

There. Isn't that nice?

What I really want to talk about is the late-period evolution of Keiichi Suzuki as an arranger and producer. If you're not familiar with Suzuki or Moonriders and cannot imagine a more tedious or obscure way to pass your time: the long and short of it is that Moonriders spent 40 years undergoing a series of astonishing and startling evolutions, all of which had less to do with "shifting genres" than to do with profound changes in their understanding of how music works, how it gets created, and what it means for different musicians to come together and make it.

From the beginning, Moonriders were a tight-knit band with an extraordinary ability to weave themselves together as a composition; this track from the mid-80s gives a good sense of how well they operated as a unit. It also hints at their myriad of influences: beneath the funk harmonies, their sensibilities are strongly New Wave, in the sense that their compositions consist of different tight loops of contrasting sound. Beneath that, you can detect their roots in folk music: you don't need to know what words they're singing to detect that their melodies are soulful, emotive, and personal, for all they're tight and poppy. By the 90s, they'd found ways of working together with such subtlety and finesse that they developed the uncanny ability to sound like entirely different bands on a song-by-song basis. It's hard to imagine that this folk song and this surf-rock song and this ballad and this I'm-not-sure-what-to-call-it were written and arranged and performed and produced by the same six people, and it's harder to comprehend that these were all on the same album. 

In the last decade or so of their existence, Moonriders' approach to making music got even stranger and more sublime. It's not that they fuse genres together so much as they skirt around the notion of genre altogether: their melodies are gorgeous, their beats and grooves and riffs are killer, and their productions are inventive and lush, but it's hard to pin down exactly what you'd call what you're listening to. And there's no reason to pin it down, when it sounds as gorgeous as this. 

Moonriders was a tight and fairly virtuosic band from the start, but on songs like I Hate You And I Love You, they're operating on a level that's fairly hard to comprehend. "I Hate You" is a driving, propulsive song with barely a pause in it, with all six band members contributing fairly relentlessly at all time; when the composition shifts, all six leap to performing new pieces so fluidly that it barely feels like a transition. Like most Moonriders music, it's so breezy and casual and just plain nice that you could overlook the genius that went into it. The brilliance never comments on its own brilliance: it's just a necessary part of making music that sounds as good as Moonriders wanted to make.

Keiichi Suzuki is credited as the "founder" of Moonriders; he is also generally given credit for the band's aggressively democratic approach to making music. All six members of Moonriders wrote, arranged, and produced songs; certain albums consist of playful games between the different members, where each contributes exactly the same number of songs to produce a kind of cycle between the six. Each of the six had a different musical background, and the band embraced that heterogenous mixture, reveling in how different each member's contributions were while also discovering new ways for each to contribute to the others' work. The evolution of sound I'm describing was no mere fluke: in a sense, it was the band's entire ethos, an ongoing attempt to discover just how deeply different performers and sounds and even ideologies could create harmony together.

For the last 15 years or so, Suzuki has been exploring a similar ethos as a solo musician. He has always had an extraordinary pop sensibility, and a knack for knowing how to combine crisp and unusual sounds together to make something compelling. (White and Black, from the early 90s, comes to mind.) In the late 00s and early 10s, though, he embarked on a trilogy of albums whose sound got increasingly more diffuse. You can hear it in the transition from Buoy to Lookin' For Miss Radio to his cover of Witchi-Tai-Tao; the first album is already soft and fuzzy, its sounds intentionally kept unsharp, but by the end of the trilogy, the production and arrangements sound almost faded, as if the different pieces are dissolving into each other. His final (as of now) solo record returned to brighter and more distinctly colorful arrangements, but there was still a diffuseness to its orchestration and production. The sound reminds me of Impressionism or Pointillism: the sounds fade into one another, enriching each other in their refusal to interrupt or distract from one another. The gentler and less distinct they all get, the richer and more essential each one sounds.

Keiichi's recent work has largely consisted of one-on-one collaborations, such as his work with YMO's Yukihiro Takahashi and No Lie-Sense, the dark and whimsical group he formed with KERA. The individual details vary wildly—both Suzuki and his collaborators are as omnivorous as ever—but there's a distinct trend towards softness and mutedness, paired with increasingly rich and vivid arrangements. The combination is a fascinating one: his compositions grow more startling and striking, but the productions themselves get increasingly gentle. They remind me of Brian Eno's original definition of ambient music: songs that work perfectly whether you focus intently on them or pay no attention to them at all.

It's not quite a Wall of Sound, a la Phil Spector or Enya. The Wall of Sound approach creates arrangements whose components blend to the extent that they're no longer recognizable as individual instruments; for lack of a better word, there's a soupiness to them. Keiichi's approach never goes in that direction: you can always clearly distinguish the instruments he's working with. Neither does it have the slickness of pop productions like Max Martin's, where the individual components are sublimated to a propulsive greater whole. What's remarkable about his work, in fact, is that you can always clearly keep track of a dozen different things happening at once, all of which serve as counterpoints to all the others, without a single piece ever quite taking center stage. In a sense, its ambience is formed from the discreteness of all its parts: there are so many moving pieces that the overall impression is one of a mood. You can, if you'd like, focus on any one piece (and be dizzied by just how many different parts are weaving in and out of one another), but the immediate impression is more one of melody and motion than of the parts.

It is very much like Keiichi Suzuki, and like Moonriders as a whole, for One Hit Wonder to feel both like the culmination of a lifetime's worth of work and like a pleasant trifle. For his entire career, Suzuki has emphasized collaboration, between musicians and between approaches to music; he has increasingly strived for heterogeneity, and increasingly discovered a gentleness that allows that heterogeneity to coexist. 

It's hard to well whether his music's warmth, playfulness, and sweetness is separate from that pursuit, or whether those happen to be the traits that let such an astonishing variety of influences coexist together. At times, it feels to me like there's no other possible way to let such music work: without that deep tenderness, without that endless whimsy, without the sheer cuteness that invariably finds its way into Keiichi's work, that spectacular diversity of sound would collapse into itself. And if those aren't always the traits we associate with brilliance, or with genius, then perhaps it's because genius is so often pre-occupied with individual distinction, with an artistic kind of dominance, that it makes no room for the kinds of ingenuity that only come about when the sum of a whole is solely the care it lends its many different parts.

It's no fluke that Keiichi's music has always been openly socialist, concerned with the individuals of the working class. And it's no coincidence that, after Moonriders largely dissolved in 2011, Keiichi formed a new group (Controversial Spark) whose composition is, if anything, more democratic and diverse than Moonriders was: the age of its founding members ranged evenly from their early 20s to their mid-60s, as many women were included as men, and Keiichi's contribution to the songwriting was more scant than ever. (Its younger members, in fact, write slightly more of Controversial Spark's music overall.)

Suzuki was raised on the would-be revolutionaries of 60s music: the Beatles, Dylan, and the Grateful Dead factor strongly into his list of influences. At times, his and Moonriders' songwriting was starkly political; early Moonriders was often fiery and tortured and lonely, and later Moonriders takes a soft, not-fully-resigned attitude towards the ongoing injustices and cruelties of the world. But there's also an ongoing emphasis on friendship, community, and hope. When Suzuki was tasked with co-writing the music of Mother and Earthbound in the late 80s, selections of his work was released as an album of English pop songs. It's no coincidence that the first song off that album was titled Pollyanna (I Believe In You), or that it was immediately followed by Being Friends.

The revolution in Keiichi Suzuki's music is as much a matter of how he and his endless collaborators made it, and of what kinds of sound resulted, as it's anything more explicit in its politics. But there is an inherent politics to his approach, and there might even be something political to the kind of music that ensues. If the end result is as sweet and easy and summery as music has ever sounded, that is in fact a part of the statement. And if it's hard to reconcile its gentle ease with the startling genius of the man who helped create it, perhaps that's because we're accustomed to thinking of genius as something that isolates us, individualizes us, rather than as the process by which we learn to come together. A utopia that works and sounds like Keiichi Suzuki might be exactly the utopia that we need; if we take care, it might be the utopia we deserve as well.