By the time m-flo began its "LOVES" series and put out the "Astromantic" album, the group had established a resume that would make plenty of other Japanese pop units jealous. As a trio, they scored a bonafide hit with “Come Again,” propelling garage music into the public mainstream in Japan. In the years surrounding their first two albums, the trio made waves by remixing top billed pop artists like Ken Hirai while also giving a much-needed boost to R&B and hip-hop upstarts like DOUBLE and Crystal Kay (more on her in a later issue). Sometimes Taku would be providing beats built around adding Lisa and Verbal to already-established songs, while in other instances Verbal would serve as a guest rapper to spice up and loan credibility to girl groups like S.E.S. Whether it was a matter of their record label seeing dollar signs, an A&R sensing a scene developing, or a little bit of both - compilation album “Sotoshigoto: m-flo turns it out” acted as a true launchpad and focal point of a group unable to be contained by genre conventions.
There was a period in Japanese popular music during which “the club” as a concept was very much at the forefront when it came to aesthetics, decision-making and goal-setting. Places like Velfarre and later Ageha helped propel a booming electronic music scene and even acted as something of a training ground for various avex-based divas (don’t you dare call them “idols,” of course). Before the era of streaming was essentially forcefully kicked into gear by COVID, before the era of digital downloads sprouted out of a need to fill then-fancy flip cell phones with clips of bubblegum sweet romantically-themed songs, m-flo was the kind of group you would find new music from by thumbing through 12” records at a real-and-true record shop.
Of course, this is not at all how I found m-flo as an American only just born in the same mid-nineties that this group rose out of. Depending on when you were old enough to get to importing CDs (or much more realistically, filesharing), this compilation could have acted as a retrospective rather than a living document. This was very much the case for me, although the sounds represented here slotted in right alongside the memories of music I was getting out west during the same time period.
For every record that blew my mind with something I had never heard before - namely “Planet Earth” with Lisa on vocals, an emotional drum and bass blitz that would fit right in the current DJing zeitgeist - there were three more records that sounded like summertime classics a la “I’m Real (Murder Remix)” by Jennifer Lopez and pre-disgrace Ja Rule. In my late teens, as I was getting my first tastes of both freedom and hard liquor, these breezy and chill-to-nearly-lazy sound paintings were all I wanted to hear. In a time before my nostalgia had become so commodofied that even state adjacent dispensaries were soundtracked by “Pimpin’ All Over The World”-style records, discovering m-flo (and of course this release in particular) felt like discovering the one stone I had left unturned. The engagement I had with the music was a mixture of what-if fantasy and expectation-setting. I learned that I might not have access to the authentically pre-smartphone and pre-9/11 innocence and reckless abandon that defined records like this one, but I could create my own fun (and my own mess) as a means of honoring my takeaways from it.
The magic of this compilation, and the magic of m-flo at large, was always bringing together sounds across a wide spectrum and presenting them in a way that showed some sense of thematic unity. Taku Takahashi has made a decades-long career out of using his DJ ear to inform his production work, and it means that almost every time m-flo puts out music they are using the most exciting sounds out at the moment. In the case of “m-flo turns it out,” this meant putting shining R&B records like Crystal Kay’s “Ex-Boyfriend” right next to Blue On Blue’s bossa nova, Ajapai’s delightful and plinky take on garage, and even rock fusion romps. On paper, this can easily paint a disjointed picture of the compilation, but in reality this kind of free-wheeling genre-hopping was one of the most reliable and wonderful features of the pop adjacent music scene at the time. It has helped some people in the past to lump some of what was described here in alongside “Shibuya kei,” but the later-released Taku mix “Tachytelic Night Welcomes You To Far East” is a much more direct and clear step in such a direction.
Two of the most sonically disparate - yet nonetheless ambitious - records collected on “m-flo turns it out” are like bridges between aesthetic fascinations that defined Japanese pop music and pop culture in “turn of the century” era. The first song in question is the group’s remix of “Behind the Mask” by Yellow Magic Orchestra, which melds the vocoded vocals of YMO with thumping garage drums and a bunch of wobble bass that predated Rusko’s infamous Fabriclive mix by half a decade. This version of the song came quite a long time after the original was released, yet it felt like a perfect way for two parties from different periods of J-Pop to meet in the middle. The end result is a nearly seven minute (yet never too long) sonic trip, something that was clearly designed with DJs in mind despite being on what was undeniably a pop-centric album.
The other end of this spectrum exists through “Violet Nude,” perhaps the most of-its-time song on the compilation but an absolutely wonderful exercise in R&B sleaze nonetheless. “Violet Nude” intersperses Verbal’s blistering start-stop flows alongside crooning from Momoe Shimano, both of whom seem to be absolutely floating over a beat punctuated by chimes and descending scales absolutely meant to invoke the phrase “Asiatic.” The song has a near hypnotic quality, suggesting feelings of longing, and yet its consistent thump and often woozy synth work makes it the same kind of hip-hop club-ready that Namie Amuro’s music at the time was starting to become.
“m-flo turns it out” is, in a way, the first m-flo “Loves” album. It is the m-flo “Loves” album that we would have received if Lisa stayed with the group for the onset of its era of heavy collaboration (no fault implied though). It serves as a blueprint for several techniques the group would weave into its fabric, most important of them all being the use of featured guests. For m-flo, these releases became such a pronounced feature of the group’s output that later editions even got a cute series name in the form of “m-flo Inside: Works Best.” While the first two m-flo albums leaned more into featuring the kind of hip-hop heavyweights that backpackers at the turn of the century loved (check out their track with Bahamadia), “m-flo turns it out” felt like the first time a seeing a clear vision of what the group could offer the future.
If you want to hear “m-flo turns it out,” you might have to look for it with a little bit of motivation and determination. Many of the songs are available on their respective original artists’ streaming pages, and even though this strips some of them of the context the compilation provided, it’s a marked improvement over old options. This is no longer an era when your only two options are the $40-50 import or the 128kbps mis-tagged MP3 rip. Take some time, get in the groove, and really sit with these songs, and you’ll almost certainly become curious about some of the dozens of artists represented. This is the magic and wonder of m-flo when it is working like a well oiled machine, and this will be explored even further in subsequent additions to this series. Until then, love long and prosper.