Turntable Terrorists: Fumiya Tanaka

By Matt Lyne | Tuesday, Dec 1, 2009

Fumiya Tanaka

There are so many minimal techno DJs in Japan, both Japanese and ex-pat. And what with there being seas of vinyl of this kind stocked in almost all record shops, and the tunes not being the most difficult to mix, it's easy to understand why that's the case. I hadn't been impressed by the sounds of most sets I had heard due to poor discrimination of quality on the record selectors' front, yet when I saw Fumiya Tanaka play at Clapper's 1st Anniversary party in 2007, he blew me away and opened my mind to what it was actually possible to create within this genre.

Fumiya Tanaka has been regarded as one of the biggest Japanese DJ/producers in techno for more than 15 years. During that time he has kept himself busy with numerous projects: he's produced countless releases under his own name and in various other guises, and has worked on collaborations with the likes of Ricardo Villalobos; he runs three record labels: Torema Records, Sundance and Op.Disc (co-op with Yoshihiro Hanno); his famous "Chaos" party takes place in both Tokyo and Osaka; and he even had a cameo in a 1998 French-Japanese film called Tokyo Eyes. And on top of all that, he has still managed to enjoy a long-running, successful career as one of the best techno DJs in Japan.

Although his unique style is focused on minimal techno, throughout his DJ sets, and in his own music, he pulls out the beauty, the depth and the thickness of all kinds of techno and creates a rich and lush sound that is some distance from most "minimal" music. This is one of the reasons why he is still at the top of his game now: he sounds different.

In 2007, Fumiya put out a DVD called Via, which contains a live DJ mix with a real-time audio commentary. This popular release vividly depicts his music and performance as being the result of physical reactions and continuous thinking. The fact that he could release something like this really highlights, not only his popularity, but that he is of such calibre that he leaves his fans wide-eyed and desperately curious about his technique and thought process. Tanaka regularly plays all over Japan, so you can check him out at a club near you.

www.fumiyatanaka.com

→ Read all of Jonti Davies's articles
Subscribe to Jonti Davies's RSS feed

Latest Forum Threads