I remain powerless when faced with obscure vinyl, curiosity and a need-to-have-it impulse flaring up in my amygdala and forcing one hand to reach for the record and the other my wallet. Which is precisely how I found myself spending something like $80 on this album the other day over at one of my newest favorite local spots, Volver Records. Eighty dollars, you half ask / half say? Yes, I reply, before my amygdala adds, but it has the obi and inserts! Add to that it being from 1981 and tagged on Discogs as “No Wave” and, fellow vinyl nerd, well, you can understand what happened. Meanwhile somewhere inside a computer at a credit card company an algorithm is trying to figure me out based on my bizarre buying habits. Good luck, algorithm.
It was near impossible to find any meaningful information on Daisuck & Prostitute online. However, Discogs did give me Daisuck’s full name, Daisaku Yoshio, as well as its Japanese spelling 吉野大作. That, combined with webpage translation functionality, got me to a recent (May 2025) interview with the man himself, located HERE.1 Yoshio (born 1951) started out doing folk, and then jazz fusion, in the 1970s as part of groups Daisaku and GOM. As the decade progressed he became more influenced by the likes of Elvis Costello and Frank Zappa, then as it came to a close Gang of Four’s Entertainment, and these eventually led to the formation of Prostitute. A 7″ in 1980 was expanded into the group’s first album, Keep Dancing Until You Die, a year later. Yoshio recalls that the band brought their own gear to the studio and that for the most part all the songs were recorded in single takes. This seems to fit with their live ethos, which leaned heavily into improvisation. “The song structure is based on the song”, Yoshio said, “so there are minimum rules such as repeating the chorus to develop or end the song. Some songs have riffs, but the rest are improvisations. Therefore, we only performed it once, and we could never play it the same way twice.” Our Beautiful Backs followed in 1985, and since then recording has been a bit sporadic.
Sonically Keep Dancing Until You Die does seem to fit rather well into the no wave camp, guitar riffs hammering over discordant sounds including the essential saxophone to create something pulsing, something organic that seems to be trying to physically crawl its way out of your speakers. And that sax… oh god that sax… tormenting and tormented, blaring, jarring, squeaking, boring a hole into my brain. Oh, and lets not forget those vocals. “So with Prostitute, I tried to sing pieces that were not written to be sung in the traditional way, with beats,” Yoshio recalled. “In other words, I was trying to integrate the poetry readings that had been done before with music. The concept was to create a so-called modern poetic piece as a song for an improvisation-based band.” As a non-Japanese speaker, however, it’s more about how the vocals sound. It’s their attitude. Their disdain. The change in speed and pitch, the occasional machine-gun-stutter.
Keep Dancing Until You Die is a tremendous record, one that can peel that lead-based paint off your brain and free you up to think differently about what constitutes music. And fortunately for us, an enterprising soul has put the entire thing up on YouTube! HERE so you can give it a listen, because I don’t see it on Spotify.
- Sometimes technology truly does amaze. If I’d have bought this record, I don’t know, maybe 10-15 years ago, I’d have pretty much had no way find anything in Japanese on it, at least not that would be readable to me. Of course, if I’d bought it in the 1990s I literally would have had no way to learn ANYTHING AT ALL about it. ↩︎