AFTER DINNER – Paradise Of Replica – LP – ZORN82

Born from Kansai’s new-wave scene, After Dinner were an ambitious 1980s art-pop group spearheaded by the singer, composer, and sound artist known simply as Haco. She’d been inspired by a slew of different music growing up: the orchestral arrangements in the children’s book and LP series Doremifa Book, film soundtracks and incidental noises emanating from her father’s television set, and various rock bands from the Doors to Young Marble Giants to Art Bears. She attended an Osakan media-art school to learn musique concrète techniques, which would suffuse the colorful tracks on After Dinner’s 1984 debut LP, Glass Tube; there, she married her avant-garde practices with her affection for pop and rock, with tape loops and found-sound collages sitting alongside prim cabaret songs. In the context of 1980s Japan, they had the theatricality of Jun Togawa and the zany eccentricity of Haniwa-chan or Wha-ha-ha, but the experience was more like being trapped in a haunted toy box.

Joshua Minsoo Kim / Pitchfork