![]() ![]() I thought you could just speed up any old breakbeats and make it jungle. When people make jungle, most folks are gonna be like, “Oh yeah, there’s the Amen break.” But, I had no idea what an Amen break was. What was it about the production of jungle that drew you to it? This is amazing.” Maybe on the soundsystems of the 1990s we couldn’t get the low bass tones as we can now, but when I heard jungle on a Yellow soundsystem in ’94 I just fell in love with it, jungle blasting at huge volumes. I could hear a ton of sub-bass, and was just like, “Oh, man. The first time I really got into jungle was when I heard this massive sound on the soundsystem at a Tokyo club called Yellow. Tell us about the beginnings of your passion for jungle. Moving on a few years towards the mid-’90s, something started creeping into your life: jungle. ![]() So a lot of times I would go to the record store and put my own records in the sleeves of other records, and then put them back on the shelves. I didn’t have the faintest idea about distribution, either. I just passed the records I made around to people, since I didn’t have any clue of how to sell them. I wanted to meet their sounds and say, “Look what I did.”Īs for running the label, I didn’t do anything, really. So, I kind of wanted to make my own answer. House music was just interesting, and I was absolutely sure that they were making it with samplers and computers, just like I made my music. But it was your house productions – your own Far East Recording label, and the music that you released on that label – that is seeing you performing all over the world, 25 years later. You got very much caught up in the hip-hop explosion that happened in Japan, especially Tokyo, in the late ’80s, and you had a group called Puzzle Jam Rockers. You were in part of a band called Tax Flee, which was signed to Polydor. Looking back, I realize that Japan had set the taxes really high.īy the middle of the 1980s, you had started making music yourself. They were also super expensive, due to the customs duty. The reason being was that YMO and all the other famous musicians were using overseas synthesizers. But it was always the synth from the makers overseas that caught my eye. Japanese synthesizers are really cool, and I used plenty of Japanese gear made by Yamaha, Roland and Korg. Was there a sense of pride in the fact that these machines were being made in Japan? But YMO really took the disco and cranked it up to 11, which I thought was super fun.Īll of this technology was being created in Japan all these companies like Yamaha, Roland and Korg. I had heard music by Isao Tomita before, and some of his stuff had a tiny bit of disco flavor to it. It was my first time hearing disco made on synthesizers, and I thought it was coolest thing ever. It was synthesizer music, but also disco. Can you remember the first time you heard or saw YMO? And I’m gonna hazard a guess that for you it was possibly the same. One thing we should speak about is, I think literally every single Japanese electronic artist, and pretty much every single Japanese video game composer, will say that Yellow Magic Orchestra was a massive influence. Sometimes I would just ditch school altogether and head straight for the game center. But once I hit high school, I couldn’t stay away from them. I really only went to game centers occasionally back then. ![]() It was all grown-ups there who had lots of money, you know? Invader houses weren’t really places for kids. Well, Invader houses were really scary places for me, as a middle schooler. You’d hear all these legendary stories about “ Invader houses,” and the Invader boom that happened in Tokyo in the late ’70s: all these dark arcades filled with cigarette smoke, where the bad kids would go and smoke and do nothing but play Space Invaders, and there were only Space Invader machines in these arcades. As a kid back then, it seems like video games just became super fun overnight. At first, you had only Pong, but from there, in not even five or six years, we got things like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Music with synths in it was becoming more of a familiar part of life. The late ’70s were right around when synthesizers were becoming prominent. Was it an exciting time? Can you paint us a picture of life as a teenager, growing up in Japan in the late ’70s? There was all this new technology synthesizers, video games, game centers. This was a time when Japan was experiencing incredible economic growth. You grew up in Tokyo as a teenager in the late ’70s. ![]()
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