Taeko Onuki’s second album makes a city visible through its credits.
Rain falling in sunshine is a name that refuses a multiple-choice question. SUNSHOWER, released in 1977, was Taeko Onuki’s second solo album. Her official archive identifies Ryuichi Sakamoto as musical director and arranger, and preserves track-by-track personnel. Those small lines deserve to be read beside the large title. A record that can now occupy an imagined city was made by people carrying out distinct jobs. Weather may appear to happen all at once; making a record requires particular contributions in particular places.
Tokai provides one small window. Its credits include Kenji Omura on guitar, Haruomi Hosono on bass, and Chris Parker on drums. There is no need to turn every participant into a ceremonial procession. Three responsibilities already establish that the singer’s name is not the recording’s only coordinate. Arrangement and instrumental performance are not optional scenery around a finished composition. They help make it this recording rather than another possible recording. In that respect, a documented collaboration can say something more exact than a stylistic label.
A title meaning city readily attracts stock images: glass, neon, an uninterrupted night. A city also means concentrated divisions of labor, with different occupations meeting temporarily around the same undertaking. Reading a record back from scenery toward work does not remove its imaginative possibilities. It gives them a support. Onuki’s position as a creative author does not require the disappearance of the people around her. Individual work and collective production can be true at the same time, a more interesting arrangement than assigning every meaning to a single all-purpose genius.
The album’s title offers an apt metaphor for that coexistence. Rain need not be dismissed before sunshine is allowed into the account. A present-day City Pop classification can help a listener find SUNSHOWER without fixing it as decoration for one permanent season. Following the songs and the names reveals relationships at the scale of a particular record. Rather than proclaiming that it represents an entire city, we might say that it offers practice in noticing the people who make something together within one.