My mate Alex is nothing if not cosmopolitan. Born in Paris, like most music folks, he has also lived in Berlin. However, he grew up, and spent most of his adult life in Japan. Hence his “stage name”, Alex From Tokyo. 

As a DJ, Alex has certainly earned his chops, from organising acid house parties in Roppongi, while still in his teens, to holding a highly coveted residency at Francois Kevorkian’s New York club, Cielo. Befriending Tokyo jazz dance legends, UFO, in the late 1980s, by the mid-90s Alex was working with James Vyner at Shibuya’s Mr Bongo record store. Another fellow shifting vinyl there was Kenji Hasegawa, and together with DJs Nori and Fukuba, they began organising Sunday sessions at an Omotesando restaurant called CAY, under the banner “Gallery”. In my mind it’s as a member of this long-running collective / party that Alex is best known. Taking its cues from NYC’s Body & Soul and Loft events, it was Gallery who hosted David Mancuso whenever he was in Tokyo.*

Production-wise, Alex formed Tokyo Black Star, back in 2000, with analogue gear expert, Kenichi Takagi, and sonic scientist Isao Kumano, and at the same time launched his label, World Famous. Recent releases have included cracking collaborations with Quinn Luke and Wille Graff. Isao is now one half of ambient pranksters, Chillax, and he and Alex also run the premium audio brand, Phonon. 

The latest release on World Famous is a compilation called Japan Vibrations Volume 1. The collection is a real labour of love, where Alex plans, over a series of records, to pay tribute to the music that inspired him while plying, learning his trade, in this adopted hometown. I know that the project has been a while in “gestation”, and that some of the licensing has taken time. When you see the track-list, featuring artists such as Hiroshi Fujiwara, Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Susumu Yokota, you’ll, maybe, understand why. 

The selections here date from 1984, with Sakamoto’s Tibetan Dance, to 1996. On the way the album takes in ambient, house, jazz, techno, and trip hop, mapping an evolving Japanese, primarily Tokyo, dance music scene, while also blurring the boundaries in between. There are tracks, like Yasuaki Shimizu’s Tamare-Tamare, an energetic exercise in electro-pop, a Manu Dibango-like musical melting pot, whose sleek, state-of-the-art, no-expense-spared production polish could only have been financed, possible, in Japan’s `80s economic bubble. Others, such as Quadra – an early alias of the now renowned electronic auteur, Hiroshi Watanabe – were clearly created on an enthusiastic shoestring. 

Travelling across a range of tempos, there’s the in-demand, intricate IDM of Okihide’s Biskatta and Mind Design’s Sun, while the progressive pounding of CT Scan’s Cold Sleep could be classified as “trance”. All three open with extended ambient intros of flickering frequencies, blue sky-ed sequences, and pretty chimes, which are then countered by breakbeats, jazz cymbal syncopation, crazy collaged rhythms, and, in the latter’s case, a big tribal thump. This sound seems to be very much back in vogue, and these sought-after pieces alone are likely enough to sell the compilation. One of the highlights for me, however, is at the other end of the BPMs. The sublime, sunset / sunrise shuffling of Silent Poets’ Meaning In The Tone samples romantic, Bollywood strings, and a haunting Middle Eastern / North African chant. It’s dancing daydream-inducing digital details splash and spray like surf crashing against rocks. It’s perhaps worth pointing out that these poets were also Jose Padilla favourites. 

*I went to one of these incredible parties, and took photos from the middle of the dancefloor. The pictures are full of smiling, extremely friendly Japanese folk putting up with an extremely pissed English bloke. I’ll have to dig them out.

Alex from Tokyo presents Japan Vibrations Vol . 1 is released today, on World Famous. If you’re in Japan, Alex is about embark on a short promotional tour…