Inside the Burgeoning Japanese Garage Scene
Nathan Evans' UK garage and club music column covers the latest songs, remixes, bootlegs, mixes and albums that captures his attention. This special edition covers the Japanese garage scene.
Cover image credit: SPRAYBOX
Inside Japan’s Burgeoning Garage Scene
Japan has held a long tradition of creating scenes out of replicating Western genres so faithfully that it attracts the scene they were inspired by. This goes for Japanese jazz, punk, folk, psychedelic rock, noise and now UK garage.
“The Japanese UK garage scene is still small compared to that of the UK, but it’s showing a great surge in recent years,” says Genick, co-founder of Tokyo label SPRAYBOX and founder of RIP club night that hosts DJ Q in summer 2023. salute and Swami Sound’s summers also have stops in Japan - it seems to be the place to be. Latter artist Swami, who was invited to Japan for a show hosted by Brooklyn’s Felt Zine collective, gushed about the community he found there: “I was in awe at the sheer amount of talent and sonic display at some of the clubs I visited, as well as the DJs I played with.”
Spurred on by the global revival of the genre, Tokyo and Kansai have each grown UK garage exclaves over the past five years or so. It’s not just an influx into Japan, either - local producers have been co-signed in prominent places, such as Tokyo producer kyo’s ‘Bloody Hell’ being included in Bklava’s Radio 1 Essential Mix. Now, Japan is starting to develop a hyperactive sound of its own.
Credit: SPRAYBOX
When American jazz artists began touring Japan in the 1920s and 30s, it sparked the original wave of Japanese artists playing the US jazz sound. Similarly, when sound systems like Sound Slugger’s tour and Outlook Festival Japan came around in 2011 and 2014 respectively, a new generation of Japanese club fans was introduced to UK club sounds. “These parties played a role in shaping the scene,” Genick says, “and the people there who woke up in love with UK Garage started to promote it in Japan.”
Being still in its early stages, Japanese garage has so far produced a convincing mimicry of the UK style. The scene’s largest home as of now is SPRAYBOX, whose early releases - with their colourful synth stabs, cartoonish sound effects, buck-wild chops and punchy percs - carry a huge KIWI Rekords influence. Like Conducta’s label, SPRAYBOX aims directly for the sweet tooth.
Japan has also tapped into other styles of garage. Take Oblongar’s ‘Come Selecta’, which is a sizzling bit of bassline that could have come from DJ Q’s lab. Meanwhile, Itaq’s ‘Lapis’ Cockpit’ was featured in NUKG Monthly recently, and with its liquid Chicago chords and stagnated vocal chops, it plays almost exactly like an MC-led UKG track save for the language. Swami Sound found a deeper connection on his trip: “One thing I did notice - and absolutely enjoyed - was the proximity between rap and dance music through artists like ONJUICY and Minami Nakamura,” he said.
Elsewhere, AWZ’s ‘Secret Weapon (Where Love Lives)’ shows how being so physically distant from the scene can lead to artists cherry-picking an amalgam of UK club sounds. Mashing up the Alison Limerick piano house classic and Flowdan raps over breakbeats and skittering percs, it fluidly folds multiple UK club styles into one hyper-recreated package.
Garage and bassline parties like Genick’s RIP started cropping up in Tokyo in 2017, and a few years later, local dance labels began to incorporate garage releases into their catalogue. Lewo Chyba’s Arkuda Label brought it into its repertoire while a few exports from Lilium Records transitioned away from hardstyle and trance of that label towards garage, and Stones Taro’s No Collars 4 Kicks (NC4K) released its first garage project in 2020 with Archipelago Soundsystem’s Rinse It Rite EP. “At that time I was trying to get away from four-on-the-floor drums,” Archipelago Soundsystem tells me. “You can only really bob up and down or sway side to side to a 4x4 beat, whereas 2-step just goes straight to your hips and you start pulling all sorts of weird angular shapes. At least I do.”
Credit: SPRAYBOX
Tokyo is the hotbed for this scene. It’s where you’ll find the SPRAYBOX crew (co-founder Genick, Oblongar, Jacotanu and Nizikawa) as well as Sibitto, Frankie $, Shunji Fujii and Oddrella. “The dance-music community at large in Tokyo is so massive yet so intimate,” says Swami Sound. Surrounded by techno, garage has become a refreshing alternative for the megacity and while venues do have the capacity for regular nights, as Swami Sound says, likening it to his native NYC, “it’s less about where you are but rather who’s playing.”
Meanwhile, the Kansai region holds a smaller but no less valuable part of the scene, providing a more eclectic complement to commercially-minded Tokyo. The region includes cities like Kyoto and Osaka and has produced the country’s biggest export so far in Stones Taro, as well as Archipelago Soundsystem, Hizuo, AWZ and Yurizo. “I do feel there is a bit of an influence coming in from the Italian dream house and more esoteric Japanese ambient stuff where you get a lot of minimalism and morphing pads,” describes Archipelago. The nightlife is significantly less established in the region (save for NC4K’s semi-regular night Pyramid that overlooks the River Kamo) but in Osaka, where Archipelago lives, there are already well-established scenes where jungle and breakcore “have never gone out of style” according to him, so the potential for a garage circuit to start flourishing doesn’t seem far away.
Genick suggests that it’s spreading even beyond these two regions that collectively hold over 37 million people. “There have been a lot of UK garage parties held around Japan lately, and we feel that the scene is growing bigger and bigger.”
Credit: SPRAYBOX
“These parties played a role in shaping the scene and the people there who woke up in love with UK garage started to promote it in Japan.”
What marries both Tokyo and Kansai together is that they’re both starting to create a ‘Japanese sound’ they can call their own. Japanese jazz waited until the 70s to develop in this way, so things are moving fast.
Oddrella’s ‘Virtual Floating’ does inventive things with speed garage bass, turning it into a restrained power-up-power-down sequence that syncs with a swirling electronica backdrop. Hizuo and his label Selva Sounds are botanically growing with more minimalism and ambient-leaning tracks. Acid synths cascade down Jaconatu’s ‘Roughing Up the Rink’ in a unique way, and tracks like Sibitto’s ‘All U Feeling’ and Oblongar’s ‘Speeder’ have wider bass glides and manic fragments chopped at warp speed. The latter track also spills the growing influence of video game music. “One thing to note is that our scene has a small connection with the Japanese subculture, such as anime and video game music,” Genick confirms.
As I wrote about earlier this year, video game soundtracks had a golden age in the 2000s, when underground club music such as jungle and breakbeat was the muse of composers like Soichi Terada and Sonic Rush and Jet Set Radio’s Hideki Naganuma. Now, the kids who grew up with those games carry those experiences with them as producers. “If you listen closely on every major release or remix I've put out there's a video game sample in there somewhere,” Archipelago reveals. “That's just a doff of the cap to crack sound design. None of us can help the eras we grew up in.” You can hear it in Nizikawa and Oblongar’s ‘Boilerman’, whose breakbeats could have been Sonic the Hedgehog boss-level music, or Archipelago’s ‘Shoe Throwin Riddim’, which he describes as, “a thought experiment along the lines of ‘what if Soichi Terada [legendary Toyko house and jungle producer who soundtracked the Ape Escape games] had made garage instead of house?’"
It seems apt to mention that Terada sees Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s group Yellow Magic Orchestra as a guiding light. The highly-influential synthpop group pioneered the arcade synths that would become the standard for the sound and tone of video game soundtracks and was bestowed the title of “Godfathers of Techno” by journalist Simon Reynolds. You can draw a line from today’s garage scene in Japan back to Yellow Magic Orchestra through Terada and the many video game composers in the 90s and 00s that built from the groundwork the band laid down in the 70s.
“I was in awe at the sheer amount of talent and sonic display at some of the clubs I visited.”
Credit: SPRAYBOX
With Japanese garage solidifying itself, the connection between it and the UK has come full circle as Japanese artists are now getting involved in the UK scene. Stones Taro has made EPs with Manchester label Hardline Sounds and London’s Scuffed Recordings; AWZ contributed to BlueDollarBillz’s Blue Tape compilation; and Nottingham’s Yes Mate Wot U Sayin released a bassline EP with contributions from kyo, Nizikawa and Oblongar.
The most curious development of the UK and Japanese garage’s relationship is Sheffield producer Spooner’s ‘4AM (Speed Garage Mix)’. Released on SPRAYBOX, it’s a remix of Taeko Ohnuki’s ‘4:00 A.M.’, a Japanese city pop track from 1978 that has been a 25m+-view hit on YouTube, where the genre is almost exclusively available in the West. There’s no switch-up to a grilling bass here, though. The breakdown is an adrenaline-fuelled kaleidoscope of the song that carries respect and adoration for the original material. Now we have a UK producer not only releasing on a Japanese label, but with a song that tributes a Japanese classic. “We were very surprised when Spooner sent us the ‘4:00 A.M.’ remix, since he is based in Sheffield,” Genick explains. “It was really important that we were able to release his Japanese city pop remix from our label.”
In 1974, one of the country’s finest saxophonists, Sadao Watanabe, accrued enough credence to record an album titled Round Trip in collaboration with revered American pianist and drummer Chick Corea and Jack DeJohnette. Equally, at the top of the year, UK label Steppers Club released a SPRAYBOX-shared EP with collabs from Oblongar and West Yorkshire’s Jack Junior, and Tokyo’s That Fancy I with London’s Sam Deeley. Even at the height of Japanese jazz, Round Trip was a one-off expedition that remains more of a curiosity; even in Japanese garage’s premature stage, it's finding its way back home far quicker.
Tami - Dirty e Sweet
I’ve been wanting to hear producers putting garage rhythms in contexts away from the dancefloor to see what untapped potential it has, and Belgian producer Tami looks to be doing that with his second single, ‘Dirty e Sweet’.
With two breakdowns, two comedowns and an outro, the structure is very similar to most garage songs but what fills that structure is interesting. Starting with demonic-sounding reversed vocals that phase in and out like a foggy memory, it switches to a beat of sour industrial clanks that give ‘Dirty e Sweet’ a feeling of desolation. The cavernous percussion is put to the front here, walling off the atmosphere in a little basement room.
Tami gets dangerously close to Burial territory (the shaker rhythm in the breakdown even calls back to ‘Near Dark’), but he sidesteps it with a paradoxically warm James Blake-quoting organ that plays a doom-stricken chord sequence. Alongside it, there’s a haunting, androgynous vocal sample that’s in as rough condition as an old book with the spine barely hanging the tattered pages on. “Because, my heartbeat is slowly…” it sings before dying out.
Mix of the Month: Prozak - vibes and stuff - 22/06/23
Prozak’s productions usually find common ground in garage and bassline’s sense of boisterous fun, but on this off-the-clock “vibes and stuff” mix, the Dublin producer mixes funky, syrupy house on a raw recording uninterrupted by mic interjection or radio tags.
Subtitled “practice hours”, the mix has the inconsequential, relaxed vibe of exactly that. It feels like you’re in the room as he’s mixing with feet planted on a rug instead on the shaking club floor. He plays pastiche-coated Chicago house á la Strictly Rhythm, as well as shades of Paul Johnson and Kerri Chandler, piano keys you can bathe in, and a soulful edit of the Streets’ iconic ‘Has It Come to This?’. You’ll get his usual style of dizzy UKG towards the end, but with an old-school grain to sew the two sounds together. The highlight comes around the 14-15 minute mark, with a 80s mechanical EBM groove with G-funk whistle and cooed vocalisations that could have come from a Brazilian MPB song. Perhaps the eclecticism of Prozak’s ear is what makes his productions so high-quality.
ec2a Takeover (Dr. Dubplate, Introspekt, Fliss Mayo) - HÖR Berlin, 15th June 2023
UK label ec2a travelled to HÖR Berlin for a mini takeover. Headed by Dr. Dubplate, the label made its in-roads making bootlegging dubplates that were so quality that even major labels wanted to make them official. Dubplate taps up Introspekt and Fliss Mayo for a three-peat of mixes, each with their own tale.
Opening up the takeover was Fliss Mayo, whose UK bass catalogue as part of Dual Monitor flies between entrancing and experimental. On this HÖR mix, she plays around with tempo often, taking things slower than most would dare. She almost slumps into trip-hip, and at one moment drags a dancehall track to the point where the vocals sound inhuman.
Through the set, she flows from deep IDM textures to tech-infused baile funk to hip-hop that could have come from the menu screen of Need For Speed Underground 2. The 47-minute mark best encapsulates this genre-blending aptitude, where UK bass squelches meet Memphis trap snares and motor-mouthed reggaeton rap vocals. Playing the opening slot often frustrates DJs who want to generate high energy but don’t want to step on the toes of the headliner. Fliss Mayo thrives under the brewing vibes of that spot.
If you listened to Introspekt’s Face Down, her set is an extension of that EP. LA’s dual-deck hornyposter starts with her ballroom-referencing cut “Walk & Serve” and goes on to wedge in a track with enough moaning to make Kevin Gates blush. Tossing in many unreleased numbers from her in-demand USB, like an airbourne remix of ‘B.O.T.A.’ and a special dub of Mason’s ‘Perfect (Exceeder)’, her mix is an oily 2step sauna where tracks slide into one another.
“Back outside and I’m activated,” Manga Saint Hilare raps before a dizzying pollution of bass kicks out. This is right in the middle of Dr. Dubplate’s set, a clinic of dark garage that basks in the summer season with all-unreleased material.
We’re halfway through the year and he’s enjoying the “anthems summer” that 2023 is shaping up to be, but he crosses it with dark, brooding beats. From the off, he gets into a bootleg of Jorja Smith’s ‘Little Things’ - the song of the summer for many - then powerslides into a Jersey-flavoured “get busy with it” dub of ‘Ladbrooke Groove’. Towards the end of the set, he spins an edit of J Hus’ ‘Who Told You’, another summer anthem this year, as well as a cursory ‘Push the Feeling On’ dub. It’s all threaded by his ear for visceral production; touch the bass coming from his platters and you’ll get an electric shock.
Pangaea - Hole Away
We’re barely in July and I’ve heard the “boom boom esso! esso!” of Pangaea’s ‘Installation’ at damn near every club night I’ve been to. It’s one of the anthems of the summer, and the lead single of the Hessle Audio head’s new album Changing Channels.
He released two more singles recently, the latter being ‘Hole Away’, a rudimentary garage house tune that could have come from Defected. The high-pitched “my mind” vocal sample hooks around the groove nicely, built off a quiet but rippling glockenspiel that snakes around a square bassline. Not as anthemic as ‘Installation’, but it’ll be interesting to see how this much simpler house direction plays out on the new record.
Wildcard: Polo Lilli - Boiler Room Hard Dance Mix
Polo Lilli recently released a remix of DJ Zinc’s almighty ‘138 Trek’ which was approved by Zinc himself. It more than earnt a curious look at his most recent mix, which is a seasoning of silly bassline but mostly bracing breakbeat and footwork that would make even SHERELLE sweat.
On his Boiler Room mix, the Bristol DJ barrels through edits at a rate that would give DJ EZ a run for his money. His mixing style is far different to what you’ll hear in garage, though. He’ll often take a track down and lay over the next track like a new slab of concrete on a road. The high tempos mean that it all feels like he’s spinning plates (literally), but he still has the capacity to surprise with a footwork switch-up that’s like dropping a gear to get the revs high in a sports car.
Other parts of the mix hides Hamdi’s edit of Sammy Virji’s ‘Never Let You Go’, and an edit of the chase music from Spongebob loaded Jersey club bed squeaks and an entire TV show’s worth of characters bringing vocals. I had to take it half an hour at a time because of its sheer intensity, but it’s a must-listen for the way he slaloms through so many tracks in ridonkulous fashion.
Speed Garage Bootleg of the Month: Knucks - Home (Amitek Edit)
Amitek’s first released track, true to its title, is more of an edit than a bootleg, as the producer doesn’t overclock Knuck’s track in the way a bootleg typically does. Handling the work of one of the UK’s best-ever storytelling MCs with gloves, he uses speed garage’s elements in moderation as crystalline synths wash over and wade under Knuck’s verses like digitised sea spray. Two Shell has an ephemeral influence here, in the trance-y pads oscillating in the second liftoff and tiny vocal shout that syncopates throughout. “I wanna be at home some days,” Knucks raps in the chorus, and fittingly, this edit works great for insular listening.