The Past is Bright, the Past is Orange Lounge

Regular Outside Left readers may have noticed that a piece we ran back in October on an obscure Japanese group from the mid 1990s called 'Satellite Lovers', proved to be our most read article in 2024. The more eagle eyed may have noticed that it's still topping our weekly chart, testament to their long lost 1996 album, 'Sons of 73' racking up 3.5 million views on a single YouTube channel since first being shared mid last year. 'Satellite Lovers' were little known members of Japan's mid 90s Shibuya-Kei music scene, and the same YouTube algorithm which threw them towards this curious writer has been coming up with further examples of the genre, no less stunning, and with no less fascinating back stories.

I give you 'Orange Lounge' - a heady concoction of Brazilian bossa nova, lounge, 60s film & TV music, 90s dance and indie pop, free jazz, and, well, pretty much anything else that swings, wiggles and bops. All sung in French, because well, back then in Japan, apparently everything French was in, in a BIG way. Conveniently, all of Orange Lounge's music is accessible via a single eponymous album that has been shared to YouTube -  well we started counting and gave up so let's say MANY times, each  racking up tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views. 

Intrigued? You should be. The more so to learn that Orange Lounge never really existed, at least not as a group. And the Orange Lounge album linked to above, which you will doubtless be listening to on repeat, wasn't even recorded as an album. Indeed, according to Discogs it's never even been released as such.

Don't worry, it's not some nefarious AI fakery. Rather the 14 tracks and 8 remixes that make up Orange Lounge's entire output, were all the work of Japanese composer Tomosuke Funkai. His musical output over the past three decades has been almost entirely for Japan's massive video games industry, with the Orange Lounge tracks all recorded between 2000-2004 to accompany games created by Bemani Works, a subsidiary of Japanese entertainment giant, Konami. Konami's own story is interesting - they began in the 1960s renting and repairing jukeboxes, later diversifying into arcade games (Frogger), film production, and most successfully, video games. But let's stick to the music.

Japan's Shibuya-Kei musical genre which emerged in the mid 1990s has been described as fusing a pick 'n mix, cut 'n paste approach to western music styles from the 60s-70s, with the rapidly advancing possibilities of the digital studio tech by then available. Shibuya-Kei composers openly admired the craftsmanship of legendary 60s song-writer producers like Phil Spector , Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach,  borrowing heavily from them as well as a from a host of other sources. Latin American rhythms - especially the aforementioned Boss Nova, 60's soul, 70's funk and disco, even Edinburgh's Postcard Records were all raided for ideas. The best of the genre, took top notch musicians, juggling disparate but familiar sounds and kneaded, knitted and blended them through the studio kit to produce something new. Handled adroitly, it could have been written off as kitsch, but instead presents as irreverently fresh and above all, immense fun.

It's an approach Tomosuke Funkai - at least in his guise as Orange Lounge mastered to a stunning degree creating something oddly familiar but at the same time breathlessly new and beguiling. He was a late arrival to the scene, his first track as Orange Lounge appearing only in 2000. There's very little biographical info on him available online. His entry in Japanese Wikipedia mentions only that he's from Hiratsuka in south west Japan, that he studied science in University before embarking on a career in composing music for computer games, both under his own name and a number of pseudonyms. In the only interview I could find online Funkai explains that his approach for his Orange Lounge tracks stemmed from a love of French lounge music. A taste acquired in childhood thanks to his parents' collection of vinyl by French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat best known outside France for his orchestral version of the song, 'Love is Blue' (make a note of that title..) which reached No 1 in the US Billboard chart in 1967.

Thanks to Shibuya-Kei, lounge music was already in fashion in some Japanese clubs, and it hadn't been used before in video games, so when the opportunity came Funkai decided to write his own. Defining the essential ingredient of the genre as being stylish, and with all things French also in fashion in Japan, he looked around for a vocalist who could manage the whispered "chanson" style of classic French pop songs. That search led to Shizue Tokui a Japanese woman who had studied in France and could sing in French.

Their first collaboration as Orange Lounge was 'Mondo Street', which appeared in 2000 on the Bemani game Drummania, their last - Orange AIR-LINE, just four years later in 2004 on Bemani's Pop'N Music game. It was a short collaboration, yielded just 14 tracks totalling little over 30 minutes of music. Most of the original versions clocking in at under 2 minutes, to fit the needs of the games they were written for. There's also at least another eight or more extended remixed versions, lasting over 28 minutes, taking the total Orange Lounge oeuvre to just over an hour. But what a collaboration. Listening to them back to back it's nigh on impossible to believe that they weren't originally conceived as the same whole they've appeared as online. Or that they still haven't seen a formal release in album form. Probably the best example of Funkai and Tokui's work is on what could be described as Orange Lounge's signature tune - 'Love Is Orange' (Do you see what he did there?).

The original vocal track lasts little over 1 minute 30 seconds. The longest extended remix extends that to over six and half minutes, thanks to a riotous cut n' paste bonanza that adds a five stage intro careering from tinkling cymbals through drums, strings, horns, jazz guitar, piano and ethereal backing vocals, before Tokui's breathy Birkinesque vocal kicks in at (checks stopwatch) 1 minute 22 seconds.

Keep listening and you'll find the verses linked by a riot of competing effects - a fusillade of brass and strings that sounds like it was lifted from the James Bond theme links the first two verses, followed by two crescendos of soaring strings - the second topped off by a tinkling piano glissando. All of which are repeated between verses, with yet more effects, over the remaining two and a half minutes left. If that sounds a bit like throwing every shade of shit at a wall to see what sticks, you're not wrong. Spoiler alert; it all sticks. Every last bit of it.

And if you've read and listened this far you're probably wondering what became of Orange Lounge and why such a spectacular collaboration came to a sudden end over 20 years ago? According to the one interview with Funkai, the immediate cause was singer Shizue Tokui moving abroad, followed by changes to his own work situation which prevented him continuing without her. Although he concludes with the comment that it's a project that he would like one day to return to.

Is 20 years too long for that to happen? I do hope not.