¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U: techno warrior

Aqui, o fenômeno rave japonês senta-se com Joe Roberts, da DJ Mag, para discutir sua filosofia e como sua trajetória musical o levou do heavy metal à música eletrônica, tudo via a estrela guia dos titãs eletrônicos The Prodigy.

Alcançou fama mundial no início de 2025 com uma performance no Boiler Room já icônica (atualmente com 21 milhões de visualizações), seu fator viral tornou‑a um ponto de referência na barra lateral do YouTube.

Filme em sua casa adotiva em Tokyo, ele immortalizou o 47 anos despojado até a cintura, cheio de ravers da Gen Z, enquanto batia a cabeça ao som de uma seleção de faixas de alta energia e heavy feels.

Uma história igualmente envolvente impulsionou esse ímpeto: há dez anos, ele sobreviveu ao câncer cerebral, embora com uma cicatriz gigante na cabeça, abandonou seu emprego como trabalhador para perseguir o sonho de ser DJ em tempo integral.

Um arco narrativo de segundas chances, florescimento tardio e esperança contra esperança em tempos cada vez mais sombrios, até Joe Rogan ampliou essa trajetória notável.

Desde então Yousuke tem avançado de força em força, tocando em ambos os fins de semana do Coachella deste ano, se apresentando consecutivamente com Charlotte de Witte sob o The K Bridge em Brooklyn, e partiu para apoiar The Prodigy em sua recente turnê Warrior’s Dance.

É a sua mixagem e seleção, no entanto, que mais distorceu a convenção e capturou imaginações ao redor do mundo. Anteriormente descrevendo seu próprio som como techno, se estendendo a todas as suas iterações globais, à medida que os palcos cresceram, ele reduziu essa descrição a simplesmente música ou emoção.

Em uma era de sugestões algorítmicas opacas, estamos prontos para esperar conexões agradáveis, inesperadas e até improváveis oferecidas de volta a nós, linhas traçadas entre o contemporâneo e o clássico.

Mas a caixa preta do USB de Yousuke parece ser impulsionada por um conjunto muito mais poderoso de conexões experienciáveis invisíveis, atravessando tempo, espaço e gênero enquanto ele entrelaça o experimental com o canônico.

Correndo por techno desestruturado depois de tocar rock de Hall-of-Famer, ou passando do pop de estádio para IDM que faz os dentes tremerem, tornou‑se lenda nas redes sociais modernas que ele pode misturar óleo e água.

A maioria das performances no Outbreak Festival vem acompanhada do conforto e da companhia de uma banda, mas Yousuke chega solo, eclipsado por enormes telas LED atrás dele e por um mar de rostos expectantes abaixo.

Vestindo uma bandana ao redor do rosto e ostentando uma camiseta “I Love London”, há um momento tenso enquanto nos perguntamos brevemente como isso vai ser recebido.

O lançamento adrenalínico de “Falling Away From Me” do Korn elimina essa apreensão, iniciando uma jornada de 45 minutos que se transforma em techno com batidas de gabber, desencadeia um moshpit ao som de “Raining Blood” do Slayer, acende cânticos no estilo futebolístico da linha principal de “Voodoo People” do The Prodigy, e atinge o auge com o que se tornou sua mistura assinatura — o electro despojado de “Kuliki” do Locked Club em “Firestarter (Empirion Mix)” do The Prodigy, uma versão robusta de techno encontrada no verso B do clássico liderado por Keith Flint.

At his East London hotel the next week, we meet between legs of The Prodigy tour. Two fresh white ‘Warriors Dance’ t-shirts hang in his room, while a Beastie Boys bag nods to the band he opened his debut Coachella set with.

No palco, sem camisa e tenso, o momento em que ele tira a camiseta a cada set (pois ele suado, explica) tornou‑se um favorito da plateia em si, seu físico magro e definido acentuando uma intensidade sombria que permanece inalterada, seja tocando The Chemical Brothers ou Billie Eilish.

In person though, Yousuke’s energy is softer and calmer, frequently punctuated by deep laughter. Wearing a t-shirt for John Lennon and Yono Oko’s amorphous Plastic One Band, around his neck hangs a ‘No War’ necklace echoing the sentiment of the duo’s own pacifism.

With a translator on hand, Yousuke switches between talking through him and occasionally addressing us directly in English to emphasise a point. What is it he loves about London, we wonder.

Growing up in the port town of Osaka, Zeppelin were one of the bands he’d hear his dad, who sold music on the side as “a hobby”, playing at home. With school life dominated by swimming training till the third year of high school, the beginning of shaping his defining build, “Music has always been something that gives me energy, ever since I was in middle school,” he tells us.

Yousuke began exploring his tastes through the then thriving music press. “Every month I would buy Burrn!,” he says, the metal magazine where he discovered Bon Jovi, Metallica, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Slayer and Megadeth.

Around the same time, he began developing a taste for nosier and more extreme sounds, too. “When I heard Pantera for the first time, I thought, this isn’t music, this is something else,” he says, further embracing death metal bands such as Napalm Death and prolific noise artist Merzbow.

A maior influência, contudo, foi a banda experimental de Osaka, Boredoms, especialmente uma coluna na Guitar Magazine escrita pelo então guitarrista Seiichi Yamamoto.

Diving into a different album each month, “You could never tell what was coming next.” It was through this that Yousuke discovered the pioneering Les Paul. Wanting to become a guitarist himself, he bought one of Paul’s famous Gibson designs, eager to style himself along the lines of Guns N’ Roses’ Slash.

One day he took a look at the new album from German conceptual rockers Blind Guardians and had a Damascus moment: “I liked them,” he assures us of their symphonic metal.

Seeing U2 on the cover of the now defunct Crossbeat magazine changed his buying habits, Anton Corbijn’s photos of ‘Ultra’-era Depeche Mode in another issue pointing to more sophisticated possibilities.

Mas foi ao descobrir Underworld, The Chemical Brothers e The Prodigy, um movimento então conhecido como “digital rock” no Japão, que galvanizou seus gostos e lhe proporcionou um trampolim para a música eletrônica.

Even before joining them on tour — hitting Edinburgh, Milton Keynes and Manchester this August, alongside fellow support acts including Carl Cox and Andy C — Yousuke had been on Prodigy man Liam Howlett’s radar.

While The Prodigy presented Yousuke with a model of electronic music that made sense coming from the world of metal, it was hearing Fumiya Tanaka playing minimal techno in 2006 that sold him on DJing.

Indo para uma festa no Sound Channel, no distrito de Tiasho, em Osaka, o clube estava situado no oitavo andar de uma antiga fábrica, com toda a sua lateral leste de vidro, permitindo que se visse o nascer do sol.

This time he did practice, he chuckles, as we enquire what he did between then and his first gig in 2008, playing “to 20 people”. Deploying metal and minimal techno on his first appearance, the all-encompassing nature of his DJing was there from the off.

His first gig listed on RA, 2016’s The Naminohana Special at Compufunk, was where he met Japan’s DJ Nobu, another DJ who’d grown up listening to hardcore punk before discovering a similar excitement in techno.

Going on to play Nobu’s established Future Terror night in Tokyo, Yousuke has suggested it was also the more experienced DJ who helped with the inception of his own Zone Unknown party, founded in 2016, after asking if he could host Sicilian artist Shapednoise, who was coming to Japan when Nobu himself was away.

Desde então, Zone Unknown recebeu nomes como Lee Gamble e Imaginary Forces, entre outros.

Despite spending three years studying to become a physical therapist after he graduated, when he finally passed the entrance exam he had a change of heart. Instead of physio, he went into construction.

Parcialmente isso foi inspirado por uma história de Yukio Mishima sobre mineradores de carvão que ele leu na escola. “Ela retrata a beleza que pode existir mesmo em pessoas que fazem trabalho manual, que podem ser vistas como estando no fundo da sociedade.” Mas uma influência maior foi o filme Eureka de Shinji Aoyama, a história de três sobreviventes de um sequestro traumático de ônibus.

Há uma cena em que Koji Yakusho lava sua pá depois de terminar um dia de trabalho manual. Eu absolutamente amo esse filme e há algo nessa cena que realmente me emociona," ele conta ao DJ Mag.

At first he performed general cleaning on construction sites, but gradually worked his way up to become a tobi shokunin, the name for Japan’s skilled scaffold workers.

Barely sleeping all weekend because of DJ gigs, then working all week, “I was just heads down doing what I had to do,” he tells us of this period. Then in the summer of 2016 he collapsed and was rushed to hospital.

Doctors told him he needed to stay, but despite the warning that he could die he initially refused and ran away. “At the time, I didn’t really understand what was happening to me.

A única coisa que passava pela minha cabeça era uma sensação quase obsessiva de que eu precisava voltar ao trabalho no dia seguinte. (Mesmo depois de deixar o trabalho manual, ele diz, ele sonhava com isso por anos.) Quando um amigo o persuadiu a voltar, uma tomografia computadorizada descobriu algo em seu cérebro.

Taking a sample, they found it was a Grade 3 cancer, with a doctor telling him the size meant it had been growing for ten years – roughly around the time he’d decided to become a DJ.

There’s an earnestness, and a hint of his locked-in onstage intensity, when he recalls the story of the operation. With the tumour sitting on the language centre of his brain, Yousuke was initially put under so they could open up his skull.

But then he was awoken so the surgeon could test each area that was being operated on with electric shocks, making sure he didn’t stop speaking before they cut into the tumour in that part.

His laughter returns when adding that, high on anaesthetic and painkillers, he realised they were playing Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ — the film soundtrack from another of his musical heroes.

Removendo o que conseguiram, ele teve que voltar ao hospital por mais seis semanas de quimioterapia e radioterapia, com a quimioterapia continuando diariamente por mais um ano.

There was a point when he thought he could die. Beyond the scar that runs across his skull, however — Yousuke tilting his head forward so we can see the deep gash, two tectonic plates fused back together after a seismic event — he was left with no ill effects.

We remind him of something he wrote, post-operation, on the fundraising page set up when he was ill: “If there is such a thing as a god of music, I even feel as if I’m being guided by some kind of power.” Does he still feel that.

Since the operation, he does believe there might be something greater than us. After his hospitalisation, a friend gave him two talismans. One was made from Tibetan turquoise, a protective charm traditionally given to someone who is setting off on a journey.

O outro era um cristal chamado apophyllite, que supostamente revitaliza células cerebrais, e seu amigo também observou que poderia refratar a luz em um arco‑íris.

Recordando-o de “The Dark Side Of The Moon” do Pink Floyd, quando ele foi mostrar a capa do álbum online, percebeu que havia uma faixa chamada “Brain Damage” (pode-se notar que The Prodigy são de Braintree).

It was a goosebump-inducing moment of synchronicity and since then, he says, there have been many moments of serendipity which have helped him along the way.

A fan of superhero comics when he was younger, captivated by their “fight for peace in the world,” as he got older he learned of people such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

who dedicated their lives to this cause. Playing Taylor Swift’s ‘You Need To Calm Down’ at Coachella, he says, was his own “message to people who express anger or hostility towards LGBTQ+ people, and more broadly, to anyone who is unable to accept diversity.” It was also his nod to an artist who risked alienating her original conservative country roots with such a political statement: “Even though I often feel a strong sense of helplessness, all we can do is keep thinking about how to make the future even slightly better.”.

After almost two decades of hard graft, how has it been to rapidly get such widespread recognition? “Before, I’d never been to the States,” he says, having got his first passport when he was 37.

Isso era principalmente o custo de conseguir um visto, ele continua, tendo capitalizado seu nome de DJ e incluído o símbolo do iene e do dólar há alguns anos, quando considerava ir aos EUA, mas ouviu que a alfândega frequentemente verificava as redes sociais dos chegados.

Beginning to tour in his late 40s is probably the right timing. “I’ve been through a lot of different experiences. I feel like I’ve developed a certain sense of who I am as a person.

That said, I still want to keep an open mind and remain flexible as I move forward. If I’d found success when I was younger, I might have gotten carried away.”.

A keen record collector with over 10,000 on his shelves, he returns to shop at Revelation Time and naminohana records as often as he can. Then there are other DJs, he says, such as Shhhhh, who’ve inspired him yet not played much outside of Asia.

Having been a huge reader of music magazines, has he been on the cover of one before? “No, because I’m not famous,” he says, giving another full-bellied laugh. By his own admission though, he’s now stopped by admiring fans at festivals.

A aceleração exponencial dos últimos anos inevitavelmente não passou sem algum backlash. Um set totalmente em vinil no topo da Tokyo Tower para celebrar os 55 anos da série de toca-discos SL-1200 da Technics provocou críticas online sobre sua seleção e mixagem (ele próprio admitiu que estava fora de prática), além dos habituais argumentos de boiler plate sobre “real DJing”.

Yousuke sounds his own hardest critic though, his tireless work ethic motivating him to keep pushing. “I want to keep on becoming a better DJ, little by little,” he says of the future.

What does that involve? “It’s hard to explain, but the more I play, the better I become. The decision of what comes next becomes clearer.” He still has the spirit of adventure that propelled him this far, which means continuing to challenge himself: “Sometimes I fuck it up!” With experience, he’s become better at recovering in the moment.

Understanding the time and money that fans invest in coming to see him, “I want to give them some energy they can take back with themselves.”.

Having become a DJ so he didn’t have to learn an instrument, Yousuke is finally turning his hand to production. How far has this got? “I’ve just started,” he bursts out laughing again, explaining how busy he has been.

An offer, however, is on the table, encouraging him to take one step closer to the aspiration of making music he first had as a teenager. Pushed for its direction, for now he assures us it’ll be “danceable”.

As for what else is next, “Continue to follow your dreams,” is his mantra — advice he’s not let up on yet.