Shintaro Sakamoto Announces Vinyl Edition Of Acclaimed 2022 LP 'Like A Fable'

Japanese musical polymath and visual artist Shintaro Sakamoto has announced a vinyl edition of his acclaimed 2022 album, Like A Fable, available July 21 through his own Zelone Records via Secretly Distribution. Today he has shared a live video of the opening track, "That Was Illegal," recorded last October in Tokyo.

Life A Fable features ten songs describing everyday life in a world which underwent dramatic changes in the midst of the global pandemic. The Tokyo-based composer/producer Sakamoto has continually updated his sound with each of solo LPs, exploring a wild array of instrumentation to meld disparate genres. With Like A Fable he has made his best pop album yet.

Like his previous albums, Like A Fable was recorded with the longtime members of the Shintaro Sakamoto Band: Yuta Suganuma on drums, AYA (OOIOO) on bass and backing vocals, and Tetsu Nishiuchi on saxophone and flute. KEN KEN (Ken2d Special, Urban Volcano Sounds) plays trombone on "That Was Illegal" and "You Still OK?". Soichiro Nakamura engineered and mastered the album. Artwork for the album was created by Sakamoto.

The title-track single to Like A Fable is indicative of the album as a whole - a depiction of everyday life during the past two years of the pandemic. While its subject matter is naturally dark, exploring our loss of physical connection during this time, musically the album is Shintaro's buoyantly POP.

In the video for "Like A Fable," created by Yasuyuki Yamaguchi, and featuring the dancer TANISHQ, Shintaro reminisces about Kamishibai ['paper play'] - a form of Japanese street theater popular in the 1930s-1940s in which stories were presented on a series of illustrated boards placed on miniature stages - evoking both the past before COVID and a future world after COVID.

Shintaro Sakamoto led the Japanese psych-rock legends Yura Yura Teikoku for twenty years before embarking on his solo career in 2011, with How to Live with a Phantom, releasing three records on the Other Music Recording Co, while garnering praise from NPR Music, Pitchfork, Vice, The FADER, SPIN, FLOOD, The Line Of Best Fit, Under the Radar, amongst others.

Watch the new performance video here: