Music of Clive Tanaka - Jet Set Siempre 1°
I’ve known about Jet Set Siempre 1° for months now, thanks to the whopping great plug from Jheri on Get Off the Coast - it’s woven reed and beach packaging is the second biggest permanent image on the page for Free Mp3 Downloads. I think I was jealous, so I never investigated. Last month, I bought it and now I would happily display its cover too, if I could figure out how.
Clive Tanaka may or may not be Japanese, there may or may not be a Clive Tanaka, and the release may or may not have an association with Tall Corn Music (though their website gives no mention of the cassette). It’s really tempting to see the recordings as conceptual and the entire project as performance. There are odd symmetries and reflections built in everywhere - the oddity of “Clive Tanaka” (English forename + Japanese surname), the individual vs. collective of Clive Tanaka with “y su orquesta,” and the cassette being divided into two four-song sections: “For Dance” and “For Romance.” Dance pop has never been so exemplary, and if it didn’t seem somehow minimizing to say so on this basis, the extreme distillation of the genre might allow me to make the leap and call this a concept album. 
As it stands, I think Jheri and I would agree that Jet Set Siempre 1° is one of the strongest cassette releases from anyone, anywhere, at anytime. “For Dance” and “For Romance,” the two divergent variations the cassette follows, provide an easy guide to its thematic content. The first side is four obnoxiously catchy, inanely danceable tracks, full of bright synths and beautifully integrated (but very heavy) vocoder. To some reviewers, the second group has compared less favorably. “For Dance” is only slightly faster paced, but evidently most people are only comfortable listening to unabashedly sappy music you can dance to. Without that intermediary, I think some listeners might be less comfortable with this variation on the band’s “extreme distillation of the genre.” The reality is, “For Romance” gives no less than what its title and its predecessor promises: a generically similar set of tracks subverted to a different thematic extreme. Both sides are earnestly beautiful, synthesizing decades of dance pop, disco, funk, and electronica into a masterpiece of post-modernist “world” music.
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