Today I'm talking about music.
It was actually around 2001 that I officially (mentally) added DJing to my musical expression. Considering that I've been a musician for 20 years, that's actually a little over halfway through. However, for the past 10 years or so, I've really focused on dance music, and my own work has primarily been dancefloor-oriented.
The so-called "electro" boom that began in 2005 was a wonderful era in which music and fashion came very close. It was a huge success, and I myself was blessed with the opportunity to DJ in various countries and places around the world. I also experienced the thrill of leading an incredible crowd as a DJ.
The electro boom was also instrumental in bringing a new interpretation of rock to the dance floor, and the rise of cool-fashioned crowds on dance floors was a major global phenomenon. Eventually, it even expanded into a phenomenon that could be called indoor raves.
However, people's minds and trends are fickle, as is the way of the world.
Today's global dance music mainstream seems to be becoming increasingly hardcore, a bit too trendy, and vulgar to me.
Considering how dance music culture has always had a cutting-edge influence on the music scene as a whole, I believe the loss of cool in exchange for success in the American market is surprisingly significant.
My club performances have centered around underground techno, and I'm more inclined toward solitude than sharing, but deep down I've been pondering whether I can somehow recreate the cool of nightclubbing from the good old days. The result was the idea that "you don't have to dance."
At first glance, this may seem like a false start, but dance music, in the sense of danceable music, doesn't exist solely for dancing. In fact, when looking at materials from the '80s, while there were exciting live band performances, it seems that indoor nightclubs rarely had predictable hands-up or rave-like peaks. Instead, I feel like the emphasis was on social interaction. It's also worth noting that in other countries, nightclubs often centered around bars. Even in ordinary bars, loud music blared, and random people lined up around the counter, chatting loudly with the music playing in the background, rather than dancing. In essence, a place is a place, and I believe the important thing is that the people who gather there create the culture. While I'm by no means trying to recreate the salon culture of Paris in the 1920s, nightclubs from the 1960s to the 1980s, and foreign bars have always been something I've always wanted to experience. My own approach to this is "SOFA DISCO." As I mentioned before, this is a way of experiencing dance music where "you don't have to dance" and "dancing isn't the main goal." Of course, sitting around all day is boring, but the purpose lies elsewhere, separate from the fuss, hands-up, and dance-obsessive nature of today's dance music scene. We hope you will use your imagination to the fullest, inspired by the somewhat contradictory motifs of sofas and discotheques, and come dressed to the nines.