Subscribe
Goth-Trad
Music festivals usually serve as an escape from the world’s issues, a chance for folks to just zone out the major news of the day in favor of a few days worth of live music. Most people who catch Goth-Trad’s set late Friday night probably aren’t expecting to think about anything heavier than their dance steps, but the Tokyo producer’s music has been shaped by a contemporary and controversial issue – life in Japan following last year’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
Goth-Trad (real name Takeaki Maruyama) began making music in the early half of last decade, his earliest recordings taking cues from noise and industrial artists. He eventually grew keen to dubstep, a then-new type of dance music out of England drawing primarily from gritty British rap music (called grime) and garage music. Goth-Trad’s dubstep tracks started catching the attention of individuals overseas, and in 2007 U.K. label Deep Medi Musik released his single “Cut End.” He has since toured all around the world, including a stop at the 2011 Coachella music festival in Indio, California, one of the most popular music festivals in America.
While he was making moves internationally, Goth-Trad also was busy trying to cultivate a dubstep scene in his home country. Alongside several other producers, he helped to start Back To Chill, Japan’s first dubstep club night, in 2006. The event – held at Shibuya’s Clubasia and still going strong in 2012 – was aimed at bringing like-minded producers together while also giving younger music makers a place to share their sounds.
Despite Back To Chill’s continued success, dubstep remains a niche sound in Japan. Globally, though, the style has gone through many transformations since 2007. British dubstep, which Goth-Trad was drawn to, started gaining critical steam in the late 2000’s and was simultaneously becoming more profitable. The actual sonic details of the genre were in constant mutation, new producers incorporating other strains of electronic music into their creations. Defining dubstep started becoming a difficult task. Today, American artists have embraced dubstep and turned it into a cultural force, led by artists like Skrillex and Deadmau5. Nicknamed “brostep,” their music is far more aggressive and discombobulating…and proving to be a big money maker.
Goth-Trad, though, remains loyal to the type of dubstep that first caught his attention. This year’s New Epoch is an album unwilling to bend towards commercial trends, instead sticking to the sort of bass and beats that sound just as good when walking around a city late at night as they do on the dance floor. The album was also shaped by last year’s March 11 disasters, to the point The Japan Times dubbed New Epoch a collection of “postdisaster pop.” The songs come shrouded in darkness and many of the sounds scattered across the album sound uneasy. On highlight “Departue,” Goth-Trad introduces a slight buzzing sound that resembles an alarm, a sound that could make anyone in Japan jittery in the months following the earthquake and tsunami.
His music might sound a bit gloomy, but Goth-Trad’s love of dubstep also insures that it remains catchy at the same time. Even when faced with the scariness of an unclear future, we can still have fun and dance. Goth-Trad provides the soundtrack.
