Susumu Hirasawa (Hiraisa Susumu, April 1, 1954 -) is a Japanese musician and music producer. His nickname is Master, Hirasawa.
In the fifth year of elementary school, Hirasawa took up the electric guitar, inspired by the surf and instrumental rock bands he heard on the radio and on TV, later joining his junior high school's band. In 1973 he formed Mandrake, a progressive rock band that incorporated elements from heavy metal and krautrock. Being one of the few Japanese progressive rock bands of its time, Mandrake achieved little success and released no albums during its lifetime.
After discovering punk rock and working on synthesizer-heavy projects, Hirasawa felt that progressive rock became just for entertainment and decided to reform the band as the electronic rock band P-Model in 1979. Originally met with success, they turned to decidedly uncommercial post-punk and experimental rock after Hirasawa went through an averse reaction to his fame. With Hirasawa at the forefront, the band went through various lineups and achieved some popularity in the Japanese independent music scene.
In 1989, Hirasawa launched his solo career. Unbound by the restraints of a band, his albums were marked by a refusal to stick to any particular genre. He continued to evolve his sound while concurrently working with two different iterations of P-Model until the group was disbanded in 2000. He has actively been releasing new music since.
While Hirasawa is mostly remembered in Japan for the first two P-Model albums, he has achieved international recognition for his soundtrack work, particularly for the adaptations of the Kentaro Miura manga Berserk and the work of anime director Satoshi Kon.
Hirasawa's music takes from such concepts as analytical psychology, advances in digital technology, the philosophies of yin and yang, and principles of nature versus machines. As an avid fan of science fiction novels since the 1970s and an eclectic reader overall, he's been inspired by the works of Frank Herbert, Carl Jung, Hayao Kawai, Kenji Miyazawa, George Orwell, Wilhelm Reich, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Theodore Sturgeon, Nikola Tesla and Kurt Vonnegut.
A constant source of inspiration for his music has come from Thailand. On a 1994 trip to Phuket, Hirasawa went through a "Thai shock", amazed by the country’s culture, namely its transsexual cabaret performers, some of whom he would invite to be singers on his albums and guest performers in his concerts throughout his career. After many trips back to the country Hirasawa grew to be increasingly identified with the transsexual population, incorporating their problems and experiences in society into his work.
On having his music categorized based on western trends, Hirasawa has said:
"I dislike it when I hear someone describe [my music] as weird rock, or weird techno. Surely this genre is hard to define in the music scene, because it doesn’t meet the standard of Western music charts. Hence if a rock music critic attempts to judge me [and my music], all they come up with is ambient music, or music to take drugs to. [The Japanese music scene] doesn't help with introducing terms such as New Age or transpersonality. I want to let my music reach a broader part of society, being music born from Japanese culture, and I think this is why I want to connect to the world that doesn’t exist in the music scene".
For every main solo album he releases, Hirasawa also stages an accompanying "Interactive Live Show", an interactive concert that merges computer graphics with his music to tell a story. The flow of each show is determined by audience participation; for example, Interactive Live Show 2000 Philosopher's Propeller was formatted as a maze, and the audience was asked to choose which direction to go in. Provided with phone numbers to four cellular phones during one song, the audience was allowed to call the numbers to have Hirasawa play the corresponding ringtones. This created an improvised harmony between the background music and the ringing phones. Since 1998, participation has been possible through the internet.
Hirasawa's live music is built on samples he activates with various hand-crafted machines and pre-recorded tracks without vocals. For the Solar Live concerts, he used solar power and a power-generating wheel as the source of energy for his electronic equipment.
Hirasawa has worked since the start of his solo career to decrease the amount of performers around himself. Most of his solo albums from 1992 onwards feature no guest musicians, and live backing bands were relinquished in 1994. Since then, only a few select shows have had guest singers or backing instrumentalists.
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日本、〒166-0003 東京都杉並区高円寺南４丁目３０−１ Map
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