Trivia / BGM

• Acclaimed Flop: BGM was highly-regarded by critics in the US, but became YMO's lowest-selling album in the territory, missing the Billboard 200 (after ×∞Multiplies just barely scraped onto it) and resulting in A&M Records dropping them.
• Creator Backlash: Ryuichi Sakamoto is open about his dislike of "Cue", citing its nature as a pastiche of Ultravox, a group he dislikes. He refused to participate in its recording, and though he acknowledges it as an important track in the YMO catalog, he still bears a grudge against it.
• Feelies: Early LP copies came with a foldout poster, a flyer for the book Omiyage, and postcards featuring photos of the band. The 2019 SACD release replicates these extra packages in a shrunken down size.
• Rarely Performed Song: "U•T" was removed from the band's setlist after their initial dissolution in 1984. While it was scheduled to be played during their 1993 reunion tour, it was taken out after the band discovered that it was recorded in an obsolete equipment standard, making it prohibitively difficult to perform again.
• What Could Have Been: Alfa Records installed a 3M 32-track digital recorder in their studio shortly before the album entered production. YMO considered using it to record the album, furthering the band's focus on technological innovation, but Haruomi Hosono found its sound quality too sharp for his liking. Consequently, the album was recorded with standard analog equipment and simply mastered with the digital recorder. This proved to be fortuitous in the long run, as no working units of the digital recorder exist anymore, resulting in reissues needing to recreate the mix from scratch with the analog multitracks.

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