aardig stukje over deze fijne chill-out techno producer:

Rei Harakami was born in Hiroshima in 1970. During his childhood he took sol-fa, guitar, and piano lessons but quit soon after, having found "absolutely no interest in them". Later, he formed a band with a bunch of junior high school friends. Since none of the members owned a multi-track recorder, demo tapes were edited and overdubbed by Harakami on his parents' double deck cassette player. By the time he started making music on his own, crafting an archaic mix of rock and techno (of which one can get a taste at the very end of Wasuremono (2006)), synthesizers were still inaccessible and expensive. After long periods of careful reflection, the equipment Harakami gathered at that time is still pretty much the same he uses today.

After graduating from college and a short career composing music for TV and advertising, Harakami sent a tape of his work to the then newly-established (but already renowned) Japanese techno label Sublime. They immediately put out Unrest, the first record in a series of 5 albums and half a dozen EPs. Since then, Harakami has collaborated with Japanese mainstream artists (Akiko Yano, UA) as well as lesser known acts (Asa-chang & Junray) and has remixed Coldcut, Nobukazu Takemura and Flare (Ken Ishii) among others. He has also performed with Dumbtype visual director Takatani Shiro and composed a soundtrack for the Megastar II planetarium in Tokyo.

While many electronic music artists put the research of new sounds and textures at the centre of their aesthethic, Harakami focuses on composition, having changed his setup only slightly since the early nineties. Record after record, he keeps using the same warm synth pads, vintage drum machine sounds and stereophonic effects almost as puzzle pieces, from which he is able to create a seemingly infinite number of sonic jigsaws.

Out of the hybrid of jazz, repetitive music and techno that established his reputation, a more personal and nostalgic style emerged, starting with the 2001 album Red Curb. Though he still performs at rave parties and in clubs, the Harakami of today eschews the parameters of techno and dance music, preferring to compare pop songs to the art of portrait. Describing his own tracks as "landscapes" -- in which no single element stands out from any other -- Harakami enjoys filling these pleasant sonic landscapes with traps, veerings, and dead ends. As such, Harakami's tracks are prone to surprise, to taking off without warning, to sudden and fanciful changes; like a lullaby suddenly waking up the baby who took so long to put to sleep.

For Harakami, the absence of melody is what sets a soundscape apart from a pop song. However, his own work features melody, albeit in the form of shards scattered in semi-random patterns, blending in intricate and obsessively-detailed refrains. In what some may call his masterpiece, Lust (2005), cymbals crash in fountains of polyrhythms, and drops of soft synth lines outline a bright and borderless world dyed in nostalgia.

Craved by both fans of the electronica scene and the wider general public, Rei Harakami's albums regularly rank as top-selling records of the genre in Japan. (Aurelien Estager)

Text © 2006 Sonore: http://www.sonore.com/artist/Rei+Harakami/