I haven’t listened to so much dub music to be honest (laughs). I think that’s the kind of music I’ve been trying to make throughout my career. They were both mechanical but also emotional at the same time. So it was techno! You first appeared to have emerged from hip hop scene, so that’s a surprise. The next thing I got into was LFO’s first album. Kraftwerk’s music is cold, but somehow emotional at the same time. The imagery from the artwork was dark, and so was the sound, and that was my starting point. When I was round about grade six, Kraftwerk’s remastered albums came out, and that really got me. Initially, I got into music through Kraftwerk. Do you have a certain musical destination in mind, or is it something that comes out naturally? You have made many different styles of music in the past, but it seems that you have a consistent aesthetic throughout: dark, bass-heavy and gritty textured. In 2012, he completed his first full length in seven years, New Epoch, on Deep Medi, and has since been pursuing a new direction in his music making. A meeting with Mala, owner of the Deep Medi imprint, saw his track ‘Cut End’ signed for release the following year, while the Skud label also imported his signature ‘Back To Chill’ track to europe, quickly making Goth-Trad’s name well known there. Much of the album was inspired by the UK’s nascent dubstep sound, and the title of one of the tracks ‘Back To Chill’ became the name of his own regular dubstep night in Tokyo. Goth-Trad’s third long player Mad Raver’s Dance Floor pushed him further into the spotlight as a solo artist. Though the band kept him busy, Goth-Trad’s early solo productions pursued the more experimental and noisy terrain heard in his recordings of the early 2000s. Their style took in dub, rock and drum & bass, developing a unique sound that became very popular in Japan. It was the abstract hip hop beats of the late ‘90s that first inspired Goth-Trad to produce his own tracks. He soon moved on to form Rebel Familia, a duo with Takeshi “Heavy” Akimoto, bassist from prominent Japanese dub-reggae band Dry & Heavy. During a production workshop at Tokyo’s Liquid Room, Yuko Asanuma caught up with him to talk about finding his sound, keeping ownership of it, and taking it in a new direction. In recent years, Goth-Trad has become one of the most respected Japanese figures in the world of electronic music.
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