My discovery of Shuta Hasunuma was a combination of Serendipity and Wyrd Fate. In March of 2013, I was ordering a copy of Úlfur’s excellent White Mountain LP from Western Vinyl. Either because I was feeling especially lucky1 or because I needed to meet some arbitrary shipping cost minimum, I decided to add Shuta Hasunuma’s Pop Ooga Plus LP to my cart as well. I had never heard of him but I was intrigued by the album cover and its description as “a gorgeously agitated record, meandering between obtuse rhythmic punctuation and gentle oscillation.”2 I listened to a sample of a song that was embedded on the store page—something that we used to do in 2013—and was sufficiently tantalized to take the small gamble on Pop Ooga Plus.
I received the records some weeks later and, as much as I still love White Mountain, Pop Ooga Plus instantly and enduringly became the more cherished of the two. From the first beat of Pop Ooga Plus—which sounds like the end of an exhalation or the final morpheme of some interrupted utterance—I found myself absolutely absorbed. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before.3 From that first breath, the album propels forward, looping and whirring and clicking and humming. It presents strange rhythms and alien tones and foreign melodies but they all somehow cohere into something comforting and nostalgic and warm. Mirroring the circumstances in which I first found it, Pop Ooga Plus felt serendipitous: its polyrhthms and strange tones all find their to way to resolution and harmony after strange disparate dances through rhythmic and melodic dissonance. All of this was completely new to me at the time—a fledgling then (as I arguably am now) in the world of experimental electronic music—but I would never stray far from it thereafter. The album quickly became a weekly if not daily listen for me and has remained as much in the ensuing decade.
Some years ago, while reflecting on the album and my hundreds of listens, I realized that Shuta Hasunuma’s music has in a very real way rewired my brain. The album created new structures and schemata for how I listen to, comprehend, and enjoy both music and sounds. It taught me to hear clicks and beeps and plucks and drips and hums differently than I ever had—indeed, it encouraged me to pay attention to sounds that I might have only ever ignored or regarded with antipathy. It introduced me to new heights of complexity and lushness in arrangement and sound synthesis and it, most irritatingly, instilled in me a craving for a sort of electronic music that nearly does not exist outside of this album. And now that my brain has been rewired in this way, listening to the album makes me feel like that gif of a box of nails being organized by being gently shaken and swayed back into its rightful order.4 5 It is soothing to me in a way that almost no other music is. It is soothing to me on a neurological level, on a circadian level, on a pulmonary level. Sure, yes, it evokes emotional reactions—from the rising triumph of Vol Struggle to the warm contentment of Power Osci or the sweet nostalgia of Barr Barr—but I can list hundreds of albums that evoke emotional reactions. Very few of them (feel like they) regulate my parasympathetic nervous system.
It is worth noting, perhaps, that I am not a music critic, journalist, or scholar. I’m not even a musician and I am not especially insightful or informed when it comes to music. Like anyone with an active internet connection and a Soulseek account, I have an extremely specific and niche taste in music, but it is not one that I would call especially refined or exacting. I can give you only a very small account of the history of Japanese electronic music and thus I cannot describe the tradition or scene from which Shuta Hasunuma emerged. Nor I am educated or experienced enough to describe the technical intricacies of his music. No, my relationship to and my comprehension of Shuta Hasunuma’s music is one that is utterly personal and primordial. I have never met anyone that knew his music6 and, even after introducing others to his music,7 I have never met anyone who seems as deeply affected by it as I am. Perhaps someone reading this will also find that they connect with his music in the same way that I do. I would like nothing more than to be the agent of Fate and Serendipity and for someone else to have their brain rewired in the way that mine has been.
For those interested in exploring Shuta Hasunuma’s oeuvre, there is no better place to start than Pop Ooga Plus. I would recommend listening to the entire album from front to back as it functions more like a single meandering piece than a collection of discrete songs, but the expedience-motivated reader may want to first check out the songs Power Osci and flying LOVE. These songs both act as decent representations of the album of as a whole, though I really do insist that the album can only be properly appreciated in its entirety. In contrast, Hasunuma’s earlier and altogether more tranquil album OK Bamboo does feel more like a collection of self-contained songs. Discover Tokyo almost feels like a short album unto itself, comprising several movements that all centre different instruments and emotions and soundscapes. Sunny Day in Saginomiya presents a much more straightforward sonic experience than many of the other songs described here, teleporting the listener to a warm and meandering summer day in Tokyo, with all the sweetness and 物の哀れ (mono no aware) that that encompasses.8
Those interested in a more traditional vein of Hasunuma’s work would do well to seek out the albums Melodies and Time plays—and so do we. Both albums were recorded alongside the Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra and are far more vocals-driven than his earlier more experimental work. Songs like Earphone & Headphone in My Head are lush orchestral reimaginings of earlier-released electronic songs. Some of his newer songs feel almost like traditional pop songs, though Hasunuma’s impeccable and unmistakable sonic signature still runs throughout them. I feel its pull in the the pizzicato in TIME.9 I feel its embrace in the loops and whirls and fractals of Teleport.
As you might have guessed from my singular focus on Shuta Hasunuma throughout this post, I do not really know of any other music that sounds like his. There are songs that seem (to me) unmistakably inspired by him,10 but I have yet to find anything with his precise combination and unification of the inorganic and organic. He has both the mathematical precision of Autechre and the ecological resonance of Úlfur. If there is anything else like it, I should very much like to hear it.
A related if tangential story:
When I first started listening to Shuta Hasunuma, I added him to my “likes” on Facebook—again, this was something that we did in 2013. Well, there was some sort of a quirk in Facebook’s “Page” system back then, such that the first person who entered an “interest” into one of their “likes” categories became the defacto owner of that Page. I have no idea why the system was designed that way but it led to me becoming the unwitting administrator of the one and only Shuta Hasunuma Facebook page.11 I remained in control of it for years, never posting or taking advantage of the strange circumstances. I simply stewarded the page, hoping that it would lead others to find and enjoy his music. On two occasions, I was contacted by (people who claimed to be) friends of Shuta and so I explained to them in broken Japanese that I was not he, but merely someone who had incidentally been charged with fanning the flames of his social media presence. With some reluctance, I will also admit that I was contacted by a woman who claimed to be his lawyer and who asked me to delete the page, as Shuta did not wish to have a presence on Facebook. I am reluctant to admit this because, well… I did not delete the page. I didn’t like the idea of there being no Shuta Hasunuma page on Facebook, as I figured it would only make his music harder to find. The long arm of history bends towards justice, however, and the ostensible lawyer eventually got her way when this quirk was fixed and the page was wrenched from my grasp. I stewarded it for at least 5 years though and I remain proud of my service. All I ask in return is that Shuta Hasunuma continue to record and release music. And if he decided to do a world tour at some point, that would also be nice.
Footnotes
I have been known to do this from time to time. When I was a teenager, I bought A Silver Mount Zion’s album “This Is Our Punk-Rock,” Thee Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing from my local record store based on nothing but its cover. I don’t think the album jacket even said the name of the band, I was just intrigued by it and perhaps felt the Hand of Fate guiding my actions. One way or another, the album (and band) became hugely influential on me, so Fate and Spontaneity have been known to play a role in my aesthetic tastes from time to time. I also discovered Owen Pallett (fka Final Fantasy) and the Mountain Goats through similar local music shop-based acts of Serendipity.↩︎
I will not produce anything more eloquent and precisely insightful as this description throughout this entire text.↩︎
and, spoiler, like nothing I’ve heard since.↩︎
I will not embed this gif here because there are few things in modern internet usage that are as irritating to me as the nonconsensual persistent looping of an animated gif. I find them to be highly distracting and mildly enervating and the fact that they are so common and yet can almost never be paused is genuinely and deeply annoying to me. Answer my letters, Discord.↩︎
I realize that this is almost certainly a video of someone disorganizing a box of nails played in reverse. It’s fine.↩︎
Some months ago, I was in a very large used bookstore. To my great shock, I heard a Shuta Hasunuma song playing on the store’s speaker. I genuinely wanted to find the employee who had selected the song but the store was several floors large and had many employees and I did not think that they would be receptive to me interrogating each of them until I found the party responsible.↩︎
Look hard enough and you might even find my uploads of his songs on an ancient YouTube channel.↩︎
Having listened to this song on a sunny day outside of Saginomiya station this past summer, I can speak to its authenticity.↩︎
2:18↩︎
Porter Robinson, if you are reading this, can you tell me where you got that Dragon Quest sweater? I would very much like to own it. Thank you.↩︎
This also led to me becoming the administrator of the Tales of Symphonia page. Let my dedication to Lloyd and the gang never be doubted.↩︎
