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their self titled albumJapanese electronic music band

The three members were veterans of the music industry before coming together as YMO, and were inspired by eclectic sources, including the electronic music of Isao Tomita and Kraftwerk, Japanese traditional music, arcade games, funk music, and the disco productions of Giorgio Moroder. They released the surprise global hit "Computer Game" in 1978, reaching the UK Top 20 and selling 400,000 copies in the U. S. For their early recordings and performances, the band was often accompanied by programmer Hideki Matsutake. The group leader Haruomi Hosono had been using an Ace Tone rhythm machine since early in his career in the early 1970s. Following the break up of his band Happy End in 1972, Hosono became involved in the recording of several early electronic rock records, including Yōsui Inoue's folk pop rock album Kōri no Sekai (1973) and Osamu Kitajima's progressive psychedelic rock album Benzaiten (1974), both of which utilized synthesizers, electric guitars, electric bass, and in the latter, electronic drums, and rhythm machines. Also around the same time, the band's future "fourth member" Hideki Matsutake was the assistant for the internationally successful electronic musician Isao Tomita. Much of the methods and techniques developed by both Tomita and Matsutake during the early 1970s would later be employed by Yellow Magic Orchestra. Sakamoto first worked with Hosono as a member of his live band in 1976, while Yukihiro Takahashi recruited Sakamoto to produce his debut solo recording in 1977 following the split of the Sadistic Mika Band. Hosono invited both to work on his exotica flavoured album Paraiso, which included electronic songs produced using various electronic equipment. The band was named "Harry Hosono and the Yellow Magic Band" as a satire of Japan's obsession with black magic at the time, The three worked together again for the 1978 album Pacific, which included an early version of the song "Cosmic Surfin". Hosono and Sakamoto also worked together alongside Hideki Matsutake in early 1978 for Hosono's experimental "electro exotica" fusion album Cochin Moon, which fused electronic music with Indian music, including an early "synth raga" song "Hum Ghar Sajan". The same year, Sakamoto released his own solo album, The Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto, experimenting with a similar fusion between electronic music and traditional Japanese music in early 1978. Hosono also contributed to one of Sakamoto's songs, "Thousand Knives", in the album. Thousand Knives was also notable for its early use of the microprocessor based Roland MC 8 Microcomposer music sequencer, with Matsutake as its music programmer for the album. Hosono, Sakamoto and Takahashi eventually collaborated again to form the Yellow Magic Orchestra and they began recording their self titled album at a Shibaura studio in July 1978. Following the release of the album Yellow Magic Orchestra, a live date at the Roppongi Pit Inn was seen by executives of A&M Records of the USA who were in the process of setting up a partnership deal with Alfa Records. This led to the YMO being offered an international deal, at which point (early 1979) the three members decided the group would be given priority over their solo careers. The most popular international hit from the album was "Firecracker", which would be released as a single the following year and again as "Computer Game", which became a success in the United States and Europe. Following an advertising deal with Fuji Cassette, the group sparked a boom in the popularity of electronic pop music, called "technopop" in Japan, where they had an effect similar to that of the Beatles and Merseybeat in 1960s Britain. Their second album Solid State Survivor, released in 1979, was YMO's pinnacle recording in Japan, winning the 1980 Best Album Award in the Japan Record Awards. It featured English lyrics by Chris Mosdell, whose sci fi themes often depicted a human condition alienated by dystopic futures, much like the emerging cyberpunk movement in fiction at that time. One of the album's major singles, and one of the band's biggest international hits, was "Behind the Mask", which YMO had first produced in 1978 for a Seiko quartz wristwatch commercial, and then for Solid State Survivor with lyrics penned by Chris Mosdell. The song was later revised by Michael Jackson, who added new lyrics and had intended to include it in his album Thriller. Despite the approval of songwriter Sakamoto and lyricist Chris Mosdell, it was eventually removed from the album due to legal issues with YMO's management. including a mechanized cover version of "Day Tripper" by the Beatles. By 1980, YMO had become the most popular group in Japan, where they were performing to sold out crowds. Their first live album Public Pressure set a record in Japan, topping the charts and selling 250,000 copies within two weeks, while their next studio album X∞Multiplies had 200,000 pre orders before release. The 1980 song "Multiplies" was an early experiment in electronic ska. They also had similar success abroad, performing to sold out crowds during tours in the United States and Europe. The band was particularly popular with the emerging hip hop community, which appreciated the group's electronic sounds, and in the Bronx where "Firecracker" was a success and sampled in the famous Death Mix (1983) by Afrika Bambaataa. Meanwhile, in Japan, YMO remained the best selling music act there up until 1982.

The band had paused their group activities by 1984. After the release of their musical motion picture Propaganda, the three members had returned to their solo careers. They were careful to avoid saying they had "split up", preferring to use the Japanese phrase meaning "spreading out" (散開), and the trio continued to play on each other's recordings and made guest appearances at live shows. Takahashi, in particular, would play the band's material in his concerts. Meanwhile, Sakamoto would gain international success for his work as a solo artist, actor, and film composer, winning Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe awards.

The early 2000s saw Hosono and Takahashi reunited in a project called Sketch Show. On a number of occasions Ryuichi Sakamoto has joined in on Sketch Show performances and recording sessions. He later proposed they rename the group Human Audio Sponge when he participates. Barcelona performance at Sonar festival and Wild Sketch Show DVDs chronicle these reunions, and include a tongue in cheek Japanese text only history of the group that spans to 2036. The band have reunited in 2007 for an advertising campaign for Kirin Lager which lampooned their longevity and charted No.1 on various Japanese digital download charts (including iTunes Store chart) with the song "Rydeen 79/07", released on Sakamoto's new label commmons. Recently performing live as Human Audio Sponge; Hosono, Sakamoto, and Takahashi did a live performance together as Yellow Magic Orchestra for the Live Earth, Kyoto, event on July 7, 2007, which raised money and awareness of a "climate in crisis". In August 2007, the band once again reformed, taking the name HASYMO or HAS/YMO, combining the names of Human Audio Sponge and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their first single under this name, "Rescue", was written for the film Appleseed EX Machina. They released a new two song single titled "The City of Light/Tokyo Town Pages" on August 6, 2008. HASYMO played two live concerts in Europe in the summer of 2008, one at the Royal Festival Hall, London on June 15, as part of the Meltdown festival of music curated by Massive Attack and another in Gijón, Spain, on the 19th. Although the primary YMO members (Yukihiro Takahashi, Haruomi Hosono, and Ryuichi Sakamoto) were effectively known as HASYMO and played both these concerts, these concerts were billed simply as "YMO" but featured only 4 YMO songs in each concert while the rest of the concert featured Sketch Show, HASYMO music and members' solo works. In August 2009, the band played the World Happiness festival in Japan, featuring many Japanese artists. The band closed the night, and confirmed that "Yellow Magic Orchestra" was their official name, dropping the HASYMO title. They opened with a cover of "Hello, Goodbye" and performed old YMO songs along with their newer songs. In August 2010, YMO once again closed their World Happiness festival. They added classic songs from their back catalog into their set list. They also covered "Hello, Goodbye" and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)". In January 2011, KCRW announced for their World Festival concert series that Yellow Magic Orchestra will perform at the Hollywood Bowl on June 26, 2011. Not long after, a concert for June 27, 2011, at The Warfield was added. It was announced in February that YMO would perform at the Fuji Rock festival in July and the World Happiness festival 2011 on August 7. In 2012, Sakamoto helped organize the No Nukes 2012 festival held in the Makuhari Messe hall in Chiba, Japan, on July 7 and 8, 2012. Among the many artists performing, Kraftwerk closed the July 7 concert, with YMO performing on both days, closing the July 8 concert. YMO also headlined their World Happiness festival on August 12, 2012. After these performances, the band once again went quiet; though no formal announcement was made of a hiatus or breakup, the band ultimately did not reconvene for further recordings or headlining concerts. On June 23, 2018, Hosono played his debut UK solo concert at the Barbican Centre in London; Takahashi and Sakamoto joined him on stage to perform "Absolute Ego Dance", marking the final time that the three would appear together in public. (The band featured in Hosono's second and third "Yellow Magic Show" on Japanese TV, both recorded in 2019; their appearance in the third was in front of a live audience, but Sakamoto appeared via prerecorded video.)

On January 11, 2023, Takahashi died at the age of 70, following a case of pneumonia. He had undergone surgery to remove a brain tumor in 2020 but continued to have health troubles that interfered with his musical activities in the intervening years. That same year, Sakamoto died on March 28 at the age of 71, following a lengthy battle with cancer; leaving Hosono as the last surviving member of the group.

While their contemporaries in Düsseldorf, and later Detroit, were using synthesizer technology to create bleak dystopian music, YMO introduced a more "joyous and liberating" approach to electronic music. According to Sakamoto, they were "tired" of Japanese musicians imitating Western and American music at the time and so they wanted to "make something very original from Japan." Their alternative template for electronic pop was less minimalistic, made more varying use of synthesizer lines, introduced "fun loving and breezy" sounds, and placed a strong emphasis on melody

The band also drew from a wider range of influences than had been employed by Kraftwerk. These influences on YMO included Japanese electronic music (such as Isao Tomita), traditional Japanese music, experimental Chinese music (of the Cultural Revolution era), Indian music (such as Ravi Shankar and Bollywood music), American rap, Van Dyke Parks, classical music, and noise. Sakamoto has expressed that his "concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise." Their 1978 hit "Computer Game / Firecracker", for example, sampled Martin Denny's 1959 exotica melody "Firecracker" The pace at which the band's music evolved has been acknowledged by critics. According to SF Weekly, YMO's musical timeline has gone from "zany exotica disco spoofs" and "bleeps and blips" in the 1970s to "sensuous musique concrète perfected" in their 1983 albums Naughty Boys and Service. Soon after Technodelic, the LMD 649 was used by YMO associated acts such as Chiemi Manabe and Logic System.

The band often utilized a wide variety of state of the art electronic music equipment immediately as they were made available. The group leader Haruomi Hosono had already been using an Ace Tone rhythm machine since early in his career in the early 1970s. It also introduced features such as a keypad to enter note information and 16 KB of RAM which allowed a maximum sequence length of 5200 notes, a huge step forward from the 8–16 step sequencers of the era. "Behind the Mask" (1979) made use of synthesizers for the melodies and digital gated reverb for the snare drums. While the machine was initially unsuccessful due to its lack of digital sampling that the rival Linn LM 1 offered, the TR 808 featured various unique artificial percussion sounds, "tinny handclap sounds", and continue to be widely used through to the present day. and their early work has been described as "proto techno" music. By the 1990s, YMO were also frequently cited as pioneers of ambient house music. They also influenced the New Romantic movement, while lead member David Sylvian was influenced by Sakamoto, who would later collaborate with Sylvian. and Asako Toki in 2006. In 2006, Senor Coconut paid tribute to the band with his Yellow Fever! album. In 2001, Jason Ankeny of the Allmusic Guide to Electronica described YMO as "a seminal influence on contemporary electronic music – hugely popular both at home and abroad" and placed them "second only to Kraftwerk as innovators of today's electronic culture." YMO are considered pioneers in the field of popular electronic music, and continue to be remixed or sampled by modern artists, Eric Clapton, Mariah Carey, and Jennifer Lopez. including its pioneers Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, who cited YMO as an important influence on their work alongside Kraftwerk. YMO continued to influence later techno musicians such as Surgeon, μ Ziq, and Cosmic Baby. "Computer Game" (1978) was later included in Carl Craig's compilation album Kings of Techno (2006). In the 1990s, YMO influenced ambient house pioneers such as The Orb and 808 State, The music YMO produced during their comeback in the early 1990s also played an instrumental role in the techno and acid house movements towards the end of the 20th century. YMO's success with music technology encouraged many others, with their influence strongly felt in the British electronic scene of the early 1980s in particular. OMD, The Human League, and Art of Noise, as well as American rock musicians such as Todd Rundgren. The "terse videogame funk" sounds of YMO's "Computer Game" would have a strong influence on the emerging electro and hip hop genres. he included both "Computer Game" and "Riot in Lagos" in his compilation album That's My Beat (2002) which consists of the songs that influenced his early career. The song was also later included in Playgroup's compilation album Kings of Electro (2007), alongside later electro classics such as Hashim's "Al Nafyish" (1983). The 1980 release of "Riot in Lagos" was also listed by The Guardian in 2011 as one of the 50 key events in the history of dance music. YMO's use of video game sounds and bleeps also had a particularly big influence on 1980s hip hop and pop music. De La Soul's "Funky Towel" (for the 1996 film Joe's Apartment), Jennifer Lopez's "I'm Real" (2001), and the original unreleased version of Mariah Carey's "Loverboy" (2001).

The band has also been very influential in its homeland Japan, where they had become the most popular group during the late 1970s and 1980s. The band significantly affected Japanese pop music, which started becoming increasingly dominated by electronic and computer music due to YMO's influence. They also inspired early ambient techno artists such as Tetsu Inoue, and the classical music composer Joe Hisaishi. The manga author Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump, cited Yellow Magic Orchestra as his favorite music band in a 1980 interview.

YMO also influenced many video game composers and significantly affected the sounds used in much of the chiptune and video game music produced during the 8 bit and 16 bit eras. In 1994, four video game composers employed at Namco formed a parody band called Oriental Magnetic Yellow (OMY), producing parody cover versions of various YMO records, consisting of Shinji Hosoe as Haruomi Hosonoe, Nobuyoshi Sano as Ryuichi Sanomoto, Takayuki Aihara as Takayukihiro Aihara, and Hiroto Sasaki as Hideki Sasatake.