You then formed Final Drop with Goro, Kaoru Inoue, and KND in 2002.
So
I’d been DJing mainly hip-hop all along, but as I dug more into the music that
spun off from it, and the more I learned about Black culture, I came to realize
that from here on out I didn’t want to keep working on vibes alone like I had
been before. I also had respect for people of
my generation and thought, “I don’t want to do things the same way as
they do.” So, I figured I needed to explore my own roots and identity
more as a DJ. Right around the time that hip-hop led me to this realization, I
had this moment of sharing my sense of things outdoors, which was Final Drop. I
had visited Yakushima Island and found the nature there absolutely amazing,
like it was a reminder of just how small I am. It helped me realize that my
focus on this confined world of “community” had been too narrow. From there, Final Drop was born out of the idea of
converting that sense of connection into sound using the recordings we
made in Yakushima. Some of the other members were Ichiko (Third eye winks),
who was also the mental partner of Rammellzee, visual artist Meikyo Shisui,
photographer Gin, and then Haruka, who later became a famous bartender. So it
wasn’t just musicians. Goro clued me into the idea of creating sound from an
objective POV, like “you cannot see the forest for the trees”.
That guy played live in front of Shibuya Station for years.