I'll confess that I've not really followed Mick Karn's career, post-Japan, bar his first two solo albums, Dali's Car, a short-lived collaboration with Pete Murphy and a one-off single (After A Fashion) with Midge Ure. I'm slowly trying to catch up.
Mick Karn fought cancer and sadly died on 4th January 2011 at the age of 52. I turned 52 in December, so it strikes a chord, listening to his music and appreciating what the legacy of what was a ridiculously short life.
I really like both albums, which both complement more than contrast with each other. I've spent the last couple of months integrating the two, playing them simultaneously in different running order, finding combinations of tracks that seemed to work well until I ended up with the selection presented here.
I've used ten of the nineteen tracks across the two albums, ever so slightly favouring Karn's original, produced by Karn and Steve Jansen. Richard Barbieri and Ryuichi Sakamoto both provide remixes, alongside other Karn collaborators David Torn and Yoshihiro Hanno. It makes for an interesting and satisfying three quarters of an hour and, like me, hopefully a prompt for you to seek out more of Mick Karn's body of work. It will reward you.
1) Angel's Got A Lotus (Album Version By Mick Karn & Steve Jansen)
2) Latin Mastock (Album Version By Mick Karn & Steve Jansen)
3) Puppeteer Night (Remix By David Torn)
4) The Forgotten Puppeteer (Album Version By Mick Karn & Steve Jansen)
5) Up To Nil (Album Version By Mick Karn & Steve Jansen)
6) Re-Nil (Remix By Yoshihiro Hanno)
7) The Salmon Of Knowledge (Album Version By Mick Karn & Steve Jansen)
8) Big Left (Remix By Ryuichi Sakamoto)
9) Venus Monkey (Album Version By Mick Karn & Steve Jansen)
10) Angel's In The Asylum (Remix By Richard Barbieri)
2001: Each Eye A Path: 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9
2002: Each Path A Remix: 3, 6, 8, 10
It was only when scheduling this post that I realised that it almost coincides with Ryuichi Sakamoto's birthday on 17th January. Sadly, it has also coincided with the sad news of the death of fellow Yellow Magic Orchestra founder, Yukihiro Takahashi, who passed on 11th January but news of which has only been reported in these parts in the last few hours.
Again, I'm shamefully ignorant of his post-YMO work but as a brief tribute, I'm posting Glow Worm from Bill Nelson's 1983 mini-album Chimera, featuring Takahashi's superlative drumming and Mick Karn on bass. I didn't hear this until roughly twenty years later, but it still sounds spectacular in the 21st Century.
