Listening to Yukihiro Fukutomi’s music takes me back to a different time. It reminds me of the first time I encountered Japanese music. If anyone else remembers this, it was staying up late at night to tune in to MTV’s AMP. It was on AMP that someone like me – far, far, far, from any major hotbed of electronic music – could tune in and catch music that sounded truly alternative. It was there that I’d find Ken Ishii’s “Extra” sandwiched in between videos from the Future Sound Of London (FSOL) or those from The Prodigy.
Looking back, I think, my first attempt to dig further into Japanese music was by trying to see who made the animation for this video and discovering Akira. It’s how I ended up hearing Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s otherworldly soundtrack – and the rest, as evidenced by this blog – was history.
I don’t know why but Yukihiro Fukutomi’s POST evokes a certain form of future nostalgia for that time.
In the late ‘80s, Yukihiro emerged in Tokyo’s dance scene, as a keyboardist for Sodom, a punk act that did a truly wild transition: from hardcore punk band to acid house-influenced dance rock unit. Playing out as a “Japanese” Primal Scream, as budding DJ and programmer, Yukihiro Fukutomi, largely, carved out the shape and sound of their leftfield direction.
By the dawn of the 1990s, Yukihiro Fukutomi, after largely making a name for himself in the club world, shifted direction elsewhere. Yukihiro began to work as a producer for bands like Flipper’s Guitar or remixing songs for singers like Kyoko Koizumi and Sandii. And looking to strike his own direction, Yukihiro spirited himself to relaunch as a solo performer.
It would be in 1991 that Yukihiro released one of Japan’s little-known (or little-heralded) pioneering works of next-gen house music. Signed by Alfa Records’ upstart electro-pop label, ZaZa, Yukihiro joined other artists like Halo, Yen Chang, and Manna, trying to carve out their own space in the post-bubble retro-inspired Shibuya-kei scene of that day. Free from Sodom’s more overt stabs at fame, Yukihiro crafted an album that pointed at the future of dance music: Love Vibes.
Love Vibes struck notes that found Yukihiro going back to a more minimal form of house music – one created at the altar of Mr. Fingers himself, Larry Heard. Jazzy, vibey, and esoteric, songs like opener, “Micromind” tip their hat to the long-form change club culture had molded itself into. Yukihiro’s reimagining of Roxy Music’s “The Space Between” spoke to the influence of UK rave music. And other songs like “Blind Alley” found him tapping into early acid jazz leanings.
However, in the tracks afterward, you can sense a genuine change from the past. Songs like “Speed” “P.C.S.” and “Macromind” tapped into a certain “je ne sais quoi” of Japan’s early ‘90s electronic dance scene. Finding inspiration in Japanese percussion tradition and a light dose of trance music, it was songs like these that rolled through that well of interior ambient music unique to the country. “Technokonk” took it even further, dipping its toes into the barely scratched minimal techno scene that future Japanese artists, like Susumu Yokota and Ken Ishii (himself), would explore.
There’s just something about his sophomore release that calls me back, though. It would be two years before Yukihiro found time between production and studio work to revisit his solo career.
Now it seems like time well spent. While the grooves of Love Vibes were trailblazing, the songs of Post still sound positively forward-thinking. On songs like opener, “Facing Up”, the contours of the minimal scene get re-oriented from navel-gazing to cloud-gazing, treating us the listeners to dance tracks that move forward by standing still.
Yukihiro’s sophistication in songwriting and sonic choices make POST a special listen. You hear it in songs like “Vibration” that embrace the percolating sensuality of his jazzier side and remixes it to this more intimate, leaner sound. Was a song like “How It Was” microhouse before such a thing existed? Albums like Yukihiro’s Post make the argument that contemporary dance music belongs more in a spectrum.
Straightforward dance grooves like “The Legible City” can mutate on a dime to something else in the span of three minutes. POST belongs to that era where lack of a wider net kept artists curious to mutate what they do know. Songs like “E X T” that take eight minutes to figure this out, sound better because of it. Myself, I keep going back to a song like “It’s Gonna Be Alright”.
On the latter part of Yukihiro Fukutomi’s POST songs like “It’s Gonna Be Alright” and its more ambient titular track capture that gorgeous bit of club culture that is being lost as the search for finding just that right tempo, just that right quantized note, is trapping us with songs that just feel like they’re trying to stay in SYNC with the crowd. The songs on POST have a dreamy quality that feels completely intimate to Yukihiro’s lived-in experience.
It’s not often one puts on something of this lineage, of this era, and feels transported somewhere else, but POST never sounds just like contemporary electronic dance music; this one sounds more timeless than that.