Time Capsule have collected a few Choice Cuts from the incredible career of keyboardist / composer Izumi “Mimi” Kobayashi. Her European CV details stints / sessions with The Associates, Depeche Mode, Hollywood Beyond, Mathilde Santing, Swing Out Sister, Stephen “Tin Tin / Dr. Calculus” Duffy, and Holger Hiller, with whom she has a son. Kobayashi has also collaborated with a long list of Japanese artists, including Towa Tei, Silent Poets, Natural Calamity and Monday Michiru.

Formerly a member of The Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra and now part of Sudanese psyche outfit, The Scorpios, while also fronting Time Capsule’s own Tokyo Riddim Band, Kobayashi began releasing music in the late 1970s. Starting out playing fusion with celebrated folks such as Jun Fukamachi, Shuichi Murakami, Yuji Toriyama and Masayoshi Takanaka, who Kobayashi worked with extensively. The tracks Naze and Angel Sky, lifted from Kobayashi’s album Sea Flight, date from this period: A cool and breezy, clipped jazz guitar-inflected tropical groove, and a soulful, swooning, romantic, euphoric, ecstatic, opulently orchestrated end-of-the-night vibed ballad, respectively.

Between 1981 and 1986, Kobayashi found wider public acclaim / fame writing theme songs for the Urusei Yatsura anime TV shows and movies – based on Rumiko Takahashi’s hugely successful manga of the same name. However during this time she also managed to complete several solo LPs. Producing Coconuts High, Nuts, Nuts, Nuts and Tropicana in quick succession. It’s from these three albums that the remaining Choice Cuts are taken.

Mas Que Nada is a funky slap-bass and syn-drum-driven version of the Sergio Mendes sing-along floor-filling favourite. Demonstrating Kobayashi’s passion for technology, it’s more bionic than Brazilian. Paralleling her countrymen and contemporaries Yasuaki Shimizu and Ryuichi Sakamoto, the results are akin to a mating of their Tamare-Tamare and Tibetian Dance.

Coffee Rumba, appropriately, rides programmed percolations, and has the real feel of someone playing with sound. Having fun. Listening I was thinking of Thomas Dolby, another plugged-in pioneer with a proper sense of humour. For example, throughout the songs selected laughter, sighs and exclamations are sampled and repurposed as percussion. Crazy Love is breathless, seductive switched-on city pop (1).

Quiet Explosion is sexy, slinky, electro-disco with koto-like keys. Kinda cute, kinda quirky like Yukihiro Takahashi’s Neuromantic. Palm St. is a lively steel-panned Latin carnival, that must surely be a jazz-dance classic. A sorta silicon chip Tania Maria, with electric bass and guitar solos, plus an amazing racing Hammond B3 run. Expresso is also Latin-flavoured, but more a Nuyorcian boogaloo. Harbouring heavenly, heavily reverb-ed vocal harmonies, fierce Fender Rhodes, and virtuoso piano vamps. Every single track here confirms Kobayashi’s mad, mad keyboard chops.

Izumi “Mimi” Kobayashi’s Choice Cuts 1978 – 1983 can be ordered directly from Time Capsule.