OK, a confession first up - we released Yuki Ota's debut EP, The Beginning Of Human, through my label IF? late last year, as well as an extended version of one of his tracks on our 13th anniversary compilation, so quite obviously I'm somewhat enamored with the guy.
Put it down to a childhood dismembered by the '70s musings of Cabaret Voltaire (The Voice Of America was my favourite album when I was a teenie-bopper), and encounters over the past 15 years with the sheer brilliance of cut-ups mixed with hilarity by Si Begg, Cassetteboy, Isnod, Dsico, Luke Vibert, Tal, Kid 606, Toshiyuki Yasuda, and their ilk.
So when I brushed up against Yuki last year, who does this kind of thing under the alias of Alone Together--and who dubs himself a 'broken piano' player--I always was liable to be smitten.
Ota-san is one of the truly innovative (and nice) guys here in Tokyo; and even Toshiyuki Yasuda thinks he's unique and crazy, and Cem Oral (Jammin' Unit/Air Liquide) rated Ota's track, Bara No Kodoku, as one of the highlights of 2008. "It's a burner!", Cem recently enthused.
While Ota's muzak is not electronic music per se, it mixes and matches, then debunks, an array of breaks, beats, sound collage out-takes, J-pop references, and--you got it--eclectic, accelerated, out-of-kilter piano riffs that made a pianist friend of mine cry. Really.
"I make the music that I want to listen to," Ota told me recently when I pressed him on the issue. "I don't make music when there has already been the music that I want to listen to out there in the world. There may be some kind of connection."
Ota, who digs old yakuza action movies like Battles Without Honor and Humanity, by director Kinji Fukasaku, but has never watched a Godzilla or Mothra flick, has an interesting theory as to why is it that Japanese techno and electronic music is so darned cool.
"In my opinion, the Japanese cannot sing like James Brown, and we're poor at using the body--but we like to imagine. The sequencer gave us the means to express that imagination through music. And we make techno music like we draw manga," he espouses.
There's also a suitably crazy video of one of Ota's tracks on YouTube.
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