In the previous visiting practioner lecture, I had the opportunity to research the legacy of Tatsuya Takahashi’s on the world of synthesizers and music technology. It was unbelievable for me that he is considerably young and yet made a significant impact in electronic music. The way he talks disarms his professional aura in a way that makes you feel you are interviewing a youngster that is about to apply to college. Tatsuya introduced himself by throwing two ways of talking about one’s life: the selfish and capitalist. He went with the first one, allowing himself to contemplate his capitalist view of his life sporadically.
You know, I’m a boring middle-class guy born in 1982, in Shizuoka, Japan, where Mount Fuji is. He left Japan to Frankfurt at a very young age, and later to London, for all you Londoners, you know zone 6 isn’t London. I had no choice where I grew up, said while describing the middle-class suburban area where he lived with his family for a long time. That lifestyle allowed him to become what he understood as a geek, staying all day at his workshop in his garage, where he built his first speakers as a kid. He made his first synthesizer at the age of 15 – I was a proud geek. For me, he was a hyperactive kid who learned so much by wanting to do a lot – an ADHD young prodigy. At that age, he taught himself about electronics, acoustic engineering, and many other things that “you are not supposed to do with 15”. Looking back to myself with that same age, I can only remember the many hours spent with my friends playing Minecraft, and which they now make me feel inadequate compared to Tsatsuya’s adolescence. Although, when discussing his moving to college to study general engineering, he said: “my course was so boring, your’s way cooler. You all are way cooler than me”. He specialized in analogue electronics to keep up with his passion for electronic music and synthesizer building.
At the end of his course, he first came with the idea to later change the perspective over music-making and electronic music practices. He wanted to make the process more accessible. With all the digital era swelling the analogue era, he came up with his first-ever portable synthesizer, which came with a strip band intended to use as an acoustic guitar. But, because his achievements wouldn’t take him that far, he “sold” his idea to a proper job at Korg’s in Tokyo. The company finally heard all his aspirations and beliefs towards synthesizers, and throughout the ’10s, he would release the following apparatus under his name:
- 2009: MicroKorg XL (digital)
- 2010: Monotron (pocket size analogue synth)
- 2011: Monotribe (bigger and louder)
- 2013: Volca’s (finished state of his first synth)
- 2014: Synth Kit for kids and education
- 2015: MS-20
- 2016: Arp Odyssey
- 2016: First Keyboard Product that he comes up with – Minilogue Polyphonic synth. First experiment with a piano interface. Great product. He had his team at this point.
- 2016: Last Volca. (Volca Kick) – the most abstract one.
- 2017: Arp Odyssey FS + Korg Monologue
After the Korg Monologue project, he moved from Tokyo to Cologne, Germany in 2018. He got a job at YADASTAR gmbH, which spawned 2 important career-changing projects related to Red Bull Music Academy.
The first project was a collaboration with Ryoji Ikeda called A (For 100 Cars). In this audiovisual composition, was made 100 sine waves generators, each with a different frequency, and played them back through 100 cars with extensive sound systems, which turned into a big drone piece.
The second one was developing a new synthesizer concept called Granular Convolver, built alongside Christoph Hohnerlein and Maximilian Rest on the 20th anniversary of the event (Berlin), given to every contestant. This device juxtaposes two concepts on electronic synthesis: granular synthesis, the manipulation of tiny signals, and convolution synthesis, the conjoining of two movements.
Talking to Tatsuya was very inspiring. I never expected to dialogue with someone who made the synths I usually work with or dream of having. In my opinion, the Volcas changed the way I used to look at synthesizers – they always seemed unreachable, expensive, and uncompressible pieces of technology. My first synthesizer was the Korg Monologue, his last achievement with Korg Japan, and it allowed me to develop my first drone experimental tracks. His legacy might be one the most generation-defining ones. I think the availability of music for people characterizes the ’10s. Many considered non-musicians were allowed to make their first steps into music using ready-to-use and straightforward software, such as Ableton, FL Studio, or Logic Pro. The digital era provides music to people and even to kids who can now play these analogue-digital instruments. “Music Has The Right To Children,” said Boards of Canada. Still, music also has the right to be part of our lives, without exclusively listening to it, but also making it, without being pressured by this huge codified background language called music theory. Music has the right to the people because it is there where it all started and where it should all end.