Alex From Tokyo recalls the changing music scenes of 1980s and 90s Japan and their totemic influence on his career as a producer, DJ and label head
Alex Prat was born in Paris to French parents, but when his Japan-raised father took the family to live in Tokyo when Alex was four, he received a culturally mixed French-Japanese education. In 1991, he returned to Paris for business school, and his friends on the local music scene – including at record stores BPM (Bastille Paris Musique) and Caramel, where he met young pioneers Laurent Garnier and DJ Deep – gave him the ready-made nickname Alex From Tokyo.
When Alex returned to Tokyo in 1995, he worked for the Shibuya outlet of diverse London record store Mr Bongo, as an agent for French labels Yellow Productions and Garnier’s F Communications, and wrote about, DJed, and eventually produced electronic music as one third of Tokyo Black Star.
As a youngster in the 1980s and at the scene’s heart a decade later, he had a unique view of the glory days of Japanese electronic music – of the post-Yellow Magic Orchestra era, when the group had become entertainment celebrities in their home country, and of the new wave of 1990s producers, who blended Western and Asian influences. Alex’s recent compilation ‘Japan Vibrations Vol 1’ is a “musical memoir” of the sounds accompanying his recollections.
“The mid-80s to mid-90s is a critical time, a paradisiac era, the golden era of Japanese electronica,” he says. “Actually, I should say electronic dance music, because many earlier Japanese musicians experimented with electronics. They’re my generation’s influences and I wanted to pay homage, which is why I included musical heroes Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yasuaki Shimizu, before I go into the emergence of the new labels and bedroom producers.”
Alex had a normal suburban Japanese upbringing, playing baseball with the neighbourhood kids, learning judo and kendo, and absorbing Japanese culture through “silly comedies and pop music TV shows”. His dad listened to the American Top 40 at home, and a friend whose father worked at Sony Music Japan introduced him to hip hop, but Japanese pop stars like Tatsuro Yamashita, Hideki Saijo and Hiromi Go were also big influences.
“They were pretty hip and well-dressed, and they followed what was going on in the US,” he says of these artists. “My parents were into them too.”
The ubiquitous Yellow Magic Orchestra were also key, before and after their 1984 split, and especially after Alex’s dad let him hear Sakamoto’s ‘The Last Emperor’ soundtrack.
“They were everywhere in Japan, they were big pop stars. They would be on the silly comedy shows, as well.”
Japan boomed economically in the late 1980s, and for Alex nowhere represented this euphoric time or the nation’s love for music more than the six-storey Wave record store in Roppongi, which stocked music and magazines from across the world. In 1988, aged 15, he was going to local discos, until a record buyer at Wave who appreciated his enthusiasm suggested he and his friends try The Bank nightclub in Roppongi. A famously safe country then and now, Japan’s door policy rarely included ID checks.
“This was my introduction to a real club,” he says. “The atmosphere was different, it was dark, they had one mirror ball with a laser and an amazing sound system. You could feel this was underground. They played Chicago house, Detroit techno, New York house, Marshall Jefferson productions on Trax. I was fascinated and inspired by the experience, it led me to a new world.”
While in Paris, Alex returned to Tokyo regularly. He saw the opening of Gold in 1991, a six-storey nightclub by the industrial port area (“A futuristic place, modelled on the best New York clubs… another level of investment”), and Space Lab Yellow, which was “on a smaller scale, very specialised, not only house and techno, but jazz, acid-jazz and hip hop”.
The real turning point, he says, came between 1992 and 1994, when homegrown labels Syzygy, Transonic and Frogman began releasing electronic music by Japanese artists. Sony Japan caught on, distributing leading overseas electronic labels like Warp, then creating sub-labels for Japanese electronic artists.
“From these small clubs in the late 80s, I experienced the evolution, the transformation, the emergence of a real scene,” says Alex.
He met Sublime Records boss Manabu Yamazaki in 1995, who gave him a promo copy of ambient techno artist Susumu Yokota’s classic ‘Metronome Melody’, released under his Prism alias. As Mr Bongo was unique in Tokyo, stocking jazz, Brazilian and rare groove, as well as electronic music, Alex got to know customers including Yokota and UFO (United Future Organization).
“We had a strong connection,” he says of Yokota, who died aged 54 in 2015. “He was doing really well, in demand internationally, but he was a very pure person and artist. He asked me to DJ at his Skintone party in Tokyo, which became his label. I went to his house regularly and he played me his demos. He asked me to read poetry on his music.”
Other key artists on this scene were Silent Poets, who were influenced both by Massive Attack’s Bristol Scene and Philippe Zdar’s Motorbass Studio in Paris, eclectic Kyoto collective Mondo Grosso, and Berklee College of
Music graduate and leading Japanese electronic producer Hiroshi Watanabe, aka Quadra, introduced by a mutual friend in New York. And as the scene grew, it diversified.
“You had different schools,” says Alex. “When all this new music from outside Japan came in, there were copies of it, but also some very personal music from Japanese artists, with traditional Japanese or Asian-sounding instruments and melodies. The theme of my compilation is to represent this international but distinctively Japanese fusion sound. The East-meets-West mix is where I come from, my universe, my environment.”
Searching for new inspiration, Alex moved to New York in 2005, then to Berlin when Tokyo Black Star were signed to Berlin-based label Innervisions. Early in 2023, he finally returned to Paris and now plans to make ‘Japan Vibrations’ a series.
“This is a cultural project for me,” he says. “I’m also thinking about a book. I wrote liner notes for each song, because there isn’t much information in English about this, or any outside Japan, and I have a strong desire to tell the stories of the artists behind the music and the scene. After 30 years, doing this feels somehow like the accomplishment, the analysis of all those years.”
‘Alex From Tokyo Presents Japan Vibrations Vol 1’ is out now on World Famous
