Golden Gems from Japan: NIPPONOPHONE Opens Their Vaults for Sampling

The first batch of songs uploaded to Tracklib illustrates how diverse the NIPPONOPHONE catalog is. Take the beautiful orchestral arrangements by film, anime, and Final Fantasy composer Katsuhisa Hattori, recorded with the Columbia Million Pop Orchestra. In contrast, another part of the catalog takes you into the music of Hiroshi Miyagawa; a composer, actor, and musician who was previously sampled by Havoc, Stoupe (of Jedi Mind Tricks), Samiyam, The Alchemist, and MF DOOM. No wonder Miyagawa composed the soundtrack for Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, later adopted by DOOM as one of his aliases.

Then, all of a sudden, the click-digging on Tracklib makes you find "Night on the Bare Mountain" by composer and synthesizer player Osamu Shoji, a heavy cover of the famous Modest Mussorgsky composition. Mussorgsky's original version from 1867 opened the video of Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic," was jazz-funk'ed by Bob James, and used in a range of classic video games including Earthworm Jim, Crash Bandicoot, and Watch Dogs.

NIPPONOPHONE offers all of that and everything in between, ranging from city pop to 70s jazz to new-age synthesizer melodies. As a YouTube user commented on 1971's Discovery of Beautiful Nippon by Osamu Shoji and Columbia Million Pop Orchestra: "When they hit that crescendo, it's as if we're dancing through a cosmic disco." Start browsing the first batch of songs on Tracklib, discover the beautiful NIPPONOPHONE, and get ready to enter new worlds.