An album made in 2026 by someone who lived and breathed '60s–'70s music. Old yet new, unfamiliar yet familiar.
The two have worked together since 2018. Sato Yukie's vintage '60s–'70s group sound and Mariko's '80s trot color lock together naturally on certain tracks. Between '60s–'70s group sound and '80s trot there really isn't much distance — these are sounds that grew up breathing the same era's air.
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An album made in 2026 by someone who lived and breathed '60s–'70s music. Old yet new, unfamiliar yet familiar.
See the album →Encountering an LP by Shin Joong-hyun and the Yup Juns at a Seoul record shop in 1995, Sato Yukie resolved to study Korean rock on stage himself. Shin Joong-hyun — who started on the U.S. 8th Army stages in 1955 and formed Korea's first rock band 'Add 4' in 1964 — is the father of Korean rock. His 1974 song 'Beauty (Miin)' was banned in 1975 and only un-banned in 1987.
The name 'trot' comes from the American ballroom music 'foxtrot.' Lee Nan-young's 'Tears of Mokpo' (1935) set the template for colonial-era trot, and Koga Masao — the composer who defined Showa-era kayo — spent his boyhood in Incheon and Seoul, absorbing the sentiment of Korea. Korean trot and Japanese enka have breathed each other's air for a century.
In the 1960s the U.S. 8th Army show stages were the cradle of Korean pop, producing Shin Joong-hyun, Patti Kim and Cho Yong-pil; in Japan, the 1967–69 'Group Sounds' boom laid the foundation of J-rock. In the 1980s Kye Eun-suk and Cho Yong-pil swept the Japanese music scene. Japanese pop culture only opened in Korea, in stages, from 1998. Mariko & Yukie's music is the most recent page of that long exchange.
