Haruomi Hosono made the first video game music album back in 1984
Long before chiptune had a name, the bassist of Yellow Magic Orchestra sat down with Namco arcade sounds and mixed them into a record. Haruomi Hosono's Video Game Music came out in 1984, one stop on a career that also seeded city pop and inspired the title of a Harry Styles album.
Born in 1947, Hosono had a famous grandfather: Masabumi Hosono, the sole Japanese traveller on the Titanic, lived through its sinking. He first surfaced as bassist in the psychedelic band Apryl Fool, whose album appeared in 1969, then co-founded the folk rock group Happy End. A song he wrote for them in 1971, Kaze wo Atsumete, resurfaced decades later in the film Lost in Translation. After Happy End split he formed a session collective that became Tin Pan Alley, and in 1973 released his first solo album, Hosono House.
His turn to electronics came quickly. For the exotica album Paraiso he brought in Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, using Yamaha and ARP synthesizers, and the trio became Yellow Magic Orchestra. In 1978 he also made Cochin Moon, a synth soundtrack to an imaginary Bollywood film inspired by a trip to India. YMO's debut that year was already studded with arcade bleeps, and after the band broke up he turned those sounds into a full album. The same year he produced the theme for Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Later decades brought restless side projects: Friends of Earth, which remade Sex Machine with James Brown and Maceo Parker; the Daisyworld label for experimental artists; and Sketch Show with Takahashi, which grew into HASYMO once Sakamoto rejoined. In 2018 Light in the Attic reissued five of his albums, four of them never before released outside Japan, and he played his first solo concerts in Britain.
For his 50th year in music in 2019 he remade his debut as the mostly electronic Hochono House, with the track order flipped, and toured the United States solo for the first time; in Los Angeles, Mac DeMarco joined him on stage for a duet. Styles has said his 2022 album Harry's House was named after Hosono House. A new record, Yours Sincerely, was announced for September 2026.
Source: Haruomi Hosono
