I have to confess: it’s never a great start when one’s research yields more questions than answers. As much as I’d like to share a fuller, richer story behind The Suzuki’s self-titled 1998 release, there’s only so much of nothing out there to grasp from. Yet, you guys deserve some content or context. Why does The Suzuki’s wildly futuristic mix of house, techno, and ambient lounge music remain as impressive as it is obscure?
On my physical copy of Suzuki, I’ve searched for myriad clues about this release. The closest I came to its mission statement was on its obi strip: “あなたの非日常はこの絵の中に.” Roughly translated, it simply states: “Your escape from the everyday is inside this picture,” or “Yours is the finger on that spot.” In hindsight, I can’t help but think that’s the reason I was initially drawn to the CD. When I came across the album in Eiji’s Revelation Time record store, I instinctively reasoned that whoever wrote this music chose its proto-Frutiger Aero aesthetic design for a reason. This was music to lose your sense of self to.
I mean, the first thing one figures out quickly when researching this group is just how impossible it is to filter through the many dead ends it’s going to lead you through. Is this Saeko Suzuki? No. How about the Mooney Suzuki? Please, no. Damo’s band? No… and so on. You’re going to dig so deep that references to the famous car and motorcycle company become part of your filter and search algorithm, until the only thing you can rely on is what you hold in your hand.
One name that sticks out on the liner notes is Tokyo-based producer and composer, Yosuke Kakegawa. Then going by the name Yoske Kakegawa, from what I gather, he got his start in the recording industry by working on Saeko Suzuki’s 1989 quasi-ambient pop album, No Life King No Music. It wouldn’t be until 1996, arguably, when Japan’s underground techno and house scenes started to bubble up into the mainstream, that Yosuke would form an integral part of it, working on some of Soft Ballet’s exploration of “IDM” on their Form albums.
Judging by Discogs credits, which is unfortunately all I can do now, it seems that back then other than working as a translator for groups like *Cocu, The Suzuki was for all intents and purposes Yosuke’s first crack at putting his musical ideas to digital audio tape. Released by Happy Go Lucky, it seemed like an outlier for a record label more known for lo-fi, acoustic-leaning, Shibuya-kei-adjacent pop music than whatever this mutant hybrid of drum-n-bass, techno, and healing music was. So what explains this release?
In that weird milieu of late ’90s mega record label mergers when UMG acquired PolyGram, little unknown labors of love like this one unknowingly got swept up or swept into even smaller niche music scenes. On Yosuke’s most current site, he speaks of living a life driven by chance and circumstance. Was The Suzuki one of these windows?
Song titles on the record, like “Rain,” “Surfing,” “Swimming Pool,” “Sea of Smith,” and “Marble” all center on aquatic, crystalline things. The music itself sounds like it transforms tropical music ideas into spritely bits and bobbles of 21st-century EDM. Many might hear the influence on songs like “Marble” or “幸子” of then-contemporary VGM soundtracks like Ridge Racer Type 4 or Wipeout. Before the sad reality of our current AI-driven content world, there was this “fragmented-future” era when the promise of Web 2.0 and imagined modernity didn’t seem so scary.
There was a time the jungle ballad “Rain” dreamcasted a different future, one where our Photoshopped creations could conjure up something fantastical, rather than prompt another ho-hum fantasy. The vibey downtempo “Glass Fruit” could soundtrack 3D renderings of an earlier, disconnected, yet-more-connected metaverse. “Surfing” and its blown-out techno remind me of the best club music from those heady days of peer-to-peer primacy, when every new file downloaded, every precious kilobyte and second of time burnt, signalled something new and exciting waiting for you.
As we go down the Suzuki, tracks like “-Plu pula-” knock and grind, churning how many(?) block rockin’ beats dancing on a pin, one big groove, myriad ways. For an hour and ten minutes, Yosuke creates an atmosphere that absolutely belongs in the next decade. The ambient techno of “Dark Star” doesn’t seek only electronic positivity — it looks for some semblance of “human” quantization. Tribal and Fourth World movements inspire the sounds of tracks like “Swimming Pool.” Atmospheric healing drives the chillout music of a song like “Sea of Smith.” What’s so impressive and masterful about Yosuke’s work here is that it’s unafraid of technology. No, Suzuki senses a way to part the sea of confusion bearing down on a crystalline electronic vision.
The album’s final track, “Ajiro 3001,” a masterpiece of Japanese deep house, doesn’t lose sight of its objective. Somewhere in the nexus of artificial intelligence there is intelligent artifice. It’s in this, this is what I believe: I want to live in a world where magicians can be ritual experts, where not everything has to be spelt out for you. I still want to believe there are still mysteries in the world and in the wonder of sleight of hand. And this I firmly believe: if Yosuke lands on my writing, I hope he can share how his hand touched this music.
