Goth-Trad feature - Published in Japanzine, 2007
This feature appears in the July edition of Japanzine. The full, unedited version of the q&a I did with Goth-Trad is available on this blog, here.
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Mutation Man
The name may conjure up images of black-clad fashion disasters wearing too much eye-liner, but the truth about Goth-Trad is rather different. In the last few years, the bizarrely monikered producer and DJ – known to his mum as Takeaki Maruyama –has emerged as one of the hottest talents on Japan’s electronic music scene. Maruyama “rst discovered dance music at the tender age of 10, kickstarting a passionate affair that’s continued to this day. “I remember hearing Technotronic and loving it,” he reminisces. “I thought ‘Techno? What is Techno?’ The sound was amazing to me.” This early interest would soon grow into a deeper obsession as he discovered Kraftwerk and started listening to the UK charts. Living in Yamaguchi and then Hiroshima, though, satisfying this obsession wasn’t always easy and he had to resort to mail order at first.
Leaving high school, and with no friends to share his passion, he continued to dig deeper and deeper, accumulating records with no real intention of ever making one of his own. At least, not until he came across the Crooklyn Dub Consortium Vol 2 compilation on Wordsound: “The sound was very heavy but also beautiful, with lots of space. It was minimal, it contained lots of elements of things I’d been checking out before. I thought, if I can make music like this, then that’s what I want to do.”
On the advice of a friend, Maruyama – then 19 years old – bought a sampler, mixing desk and an old Macintosh and started to pillage his record collection for samples. He spent the next few years feverishly producing music, which he would record to cassettes and pass around. One of these tapes made it into the hands of DJ Kensei, a well-regarded figure on the underground scene who gave Maruyama his first official release on the Si-Con compilation in 2001. His chosen nom-de-plume? Goth-Trad. Kensei wasn’t the only one to recognize Maruyama’s talents, though: the same year, he was offered a ¥2 million record deal for his first album. He turned it down. “I didn’t like to talk about money!” he laughs. “I wanted to release on foreign labels. And I was young at the time, so I refused.”
Having passed on what many would consider the offer of a lifetime, he released his debut album, Goth Trad 1, in 2003. At this point he’d started experimenting with harder, darker sounds and moving towards noise music, a direction he maintained for several years. “The second half of the album was all improvisation, and the reason why I started making noise in the “rst place,” he explains. “I wanted to be able to play my music out live with no sequencer, using real-time sampling, e!ecting and dubbing.” This live approach to music making, using an array of selfmade instruments and gear, is something he never abandoned. His second album, The Inverted Perspective, was recorded in the same fashion and today his shows continue to develop and re”ne this approach: everything you hear is created, manipulated and e!ected live, giving the music a dynamic feel that’s rarely heard in today’s dance scene.
However, it was on the third Goth-Trad album, 2005’s Mad Raver’s Dance Floor, that Maruyama really came into his own. The record moved away from noise and focused on what he termed ‘Mad Rave’, a fusion and distillation of all the dance music styles he’d been exposed to and influenced by since childhood. “Mad Rave was me drawing on the stu! I used to listen to as a kid – old techno, house and jungle – and the music I’d been discovering between 2003 and 2005: crunk, UK garage, 2-step, grime. I made all the tracks for the album during those two years.”
It was the logical culmination of 15 years of collecting and making music. The record’s ten tracks are like a guided tour through the last decade-and-a-half of dance’s evolution, each re$ecting Maruyama’s own take on what the sounds mean to him. Stand-out cut ‘Back To Chill’ fuses the simplicity and impact of grime with eastern in$uences to devastating e!ect, whilst ‘Acid Steps’ is Acid House brought back from the dead and jacked up with steroids. Maruyama has spent the following two years pushing and re”ning the Mad Rave sound, both in Japan and further a”eld. Taking advantage of the wonders of MySpace, he built links with the booming UK dubstep scene in 2006, and last September set up Japan’s first night dedicated to dubstep, grime and Mad Rave, entitled Back To Chill. Goth-Trad’s sounds resonated well with dubstep, and he has now had two releases on British labels. He also supported UK dubstep pioneers Mala (of Digital Mystikz) and Skream on their Japanese tours earlier this year.
However, there’s more to Mad Rave than dubstep, and Goth-Trad’s music has found support and interest across a broad swathe of genres. You’ll find him on the bills at drum & bass, breakcore, reggae, hip hop and electronica events, both solo or with Rebel Familia, his duo with former Dry & Heavy bassist Takeshi Akimoto. And wherever he goes, people always remember his name.
Goth Trad’s one-man army takeover of dance music continues apace in 2007 with more live dates up and down the country, a European tour in the summer, production for various Japanese artists, a new album and a lot more to come. The late 1980s saw rave take over Europe – perhaps the late noughties will see Mad Rave take over the world?
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