Night Drive on the Hundred-Metre Road 🌃 80s Japanese City Pop — Nagoya 1982, Music for Work

🌃🎧 Sixty-one minutes of 80s Japanese city pop from Nagoya, 1982 — a Rhodes and a saxophone trading phrases bar by bar, a clavinet chopping muted chords underneath, and a crisp 80s kit on the backbeat. Instrumental background music for work, study and long evenings. 100% instrumental. Nagoya burned in the air raids of 1945, and the city that was rebuilt gave itself room: two avenues a hundred metres wide, Hisaya-ōdōri and Wakamiya-ōdōri, laid out as firebreaks, with a park down the middle of the first. In that park stands the television tower, finished in 1954, the first of its kind in Japan. This album spends one late-October day in the city and keeps the night for one of those avenues, the tower lit up in the windscreen. Perfect for: the last hours at the desk · a long drive after dark · the evening shift · a record that asks nothing of you 🎧 Best with headphones. ▶ New mixes every Monday & Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/@NeonLotus-77... 🎶 More like this → City Pop Nights:    • City Pop Nights — 80s Asian City Pop for a...   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🚉 AUTUMN LINE — seventeen stops, one falling season ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Seventeen stops, timed to the autumn colour as it travels down Japan at a few kilometres a day, from late September to the end of November. By Nagoya it has only just reached the plain, and the trees along the avenues are beginning to turn. City pop on Mondays in Japan, lo-fi on Thursdays elsewhere in Asia. 01 · HAKODATE — 5 Oct 02 · HANOI — 8 Oct 03 · SENDAI — 12 Oct 04 · NIIGATA — 15 Oct 05 · KANAZAWA — 19 Oct 06 · TOYAMA — 22 Oct ▸ 07 · NAGOYA — 26 Oct ← you are here 08 · HAMAMATSU — 29 Oct 09 · NARA — 2 Nov 10 · CHIANG MAI — 5 Nov 11 · HIROSHIMA — 9 Nov 12 · SAPA — 12 Nov 13 · MATSUYAMA — 16 Nov 14 · LUANG PRABANG — 19 Nov 15 · KUMAMOTO — 23 Nov 16 · SASEBO — 26 Nov 17 · NAGASAKI — 30 Nov Subscribe to ride the rest of it. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Morning Service 3:42 Kishimen on the Station Platform 6:51 Noon Under the Television Tower 10:51 Hitsumabushi, Three Ways 13:56 Indigo Cloth in Arimatsu 18:16 The Old Glasshouse at Higashiyama 22:26 Under the Old Camphor at Atsuta 27:01 Osu, the Arcade by the Temple 31:37 The Day Shift Drives Home 35:57 Under Sakae, Below the Street 39:24 Car Carriers at the Port 43:23 Tebasaki, Two Plates More 46:59 Night Drive on the Hundred-Metre Road 50:58 Game Three on the Car Radio 55:08 The Expressway After Midnight 58:19 East on Route One ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🎛 WHAT YOU ARE LISTENING TO ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ No guitar on this one: the clavinet takes its place. 🎹 CLAVINET — the funk keyboard of the seventies, played as short muted chord chops through every bar. It drives eleven of the sixteen tracks and steps aside for five: the eel, the mall under Sakae, the chicken wings, the expressway and the road east. 🎹 RHODES — the lead on six tracks (the morning, the tower, the glasshouse, Ōsu, the port, game three) and the answer on the other ten. 🎷 SAXOPHONE — the lead on the other ten. On three of them (Arimatsu, the title track and the last one) it doubles itself an octave up for the final third. 🎸 BASS — through the first half, fingered sixteenths that leap an octave on the last beat of every bar. From the day shift on it is left free, and the keyboards carry the groove. 🥁 DRUMS — a crisp 80s kit: snare on two and four, sixteenth-note hats opening on every offbeat, the kick doubling on the last eighth, a fill every eighth bar. Tempos between 84 and 94 BPM. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🌃 NAGOYA — 1982 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Order a coffee in Nagoya in the morning and it arrives with thick toast and a boiled egg at no extra charge: the "morning service", track one. The flat noodles called kishimen are eaten standing on the station platforms; eel over rice, hitsumabushi, is eaten three ways from one tub; tebasaki, peppered chicken wings, come by the plateful. Arimatsu, an old post town on the Tōkaidō, has tie-dyed cloth in indigo since the early 1600s. The glasshouse in the Higashiyama gardens dates from 1937. The great camphor at Atsuta Shrine is said to be more than a thousand years old. The arcades of Ōsu spread out from a Kannon temple, and under the Sakae crossing a shopping street runs beneath the traffic. This is the car city: the plants lie to the east, and at the port the carriers load new cars for export. On 26 October 1982, the day this album is set, the Chunichi Dragons won the third game of the Japan Series, 4–3 at Tokorozawa: track fourteen, on the car radio. The urban expressway opened its first section in 1979, and after midnight it is empty. 🎧 Sixty-one minutes, each track running straight into the next: in at a coffee shop at breakfast, out on Route 1 east after midnight. Next stop: Hamamatsu, 29 October. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🪷 NeonLotus — Asian Instrumental Music ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔔 Subscribe for Asian city pop and lo-fi, every Monday & Thursday:    / @neonlotus-77   #JapaneseCityPop #CityPop #Nagoya #Clavinet