I make electro-acoustic ninja hippy beats music, rooted in hip-hop and a youth spent playing Megadrive and watching anime. I started off on more of a crate diggy thing, but now it’s more of a field recordy electronicy thing.

Kidsuke is me and Daisuke Tanabe forming like Voltron to make music.

A lot of chimes and lazers and freaked animal sounds. It maybe looks to childhood a lot. We basically just made our own anime soundtrack.

I’ve been a geek fan of his music for a while, but we actually met as participants on Red Bull Music Academy in 2010. He’s one of my favourite producers, he has a uniqueness and an honest to his style that I really admire. His beats always have an emotional purpose as opposed to just being a banger or some trendy shit or whatever. I think Japanese musicians in general are more humble too, which I like. In the west a lot of our electronic music is more arrogant and aggressive I guess. Also he has a wonderful balance between organic and electronic elements in his music, which I love.

We kinda clicked when we met, I think the idea started floating around pretty much straight away. We had a show together for Syndicate in Singapore and then I went to Japan for a bit and that’s when we started talking about it in a more serious way.

It started when I was pretty young actually, mainly through anime and computer games. As a kid in growing up in urban northern England I guess anime and Sega and samurai films have a magic to them, an otherworldliness that’s always stayed with me and continued to inspire. Funnily enough having been there as an adult it doesn’t feel any less that way, it really is an incredible place. You walk around Tokyo like ‘oh ok, so the anime wasn’t so far fetched after all’. But out in the country it’s like a Kurosawa scene. Which I guess is obvious if you’re Japanese but as an outsider it’s kinda amazing. Haha, maybe that’s like coming to the UK and being like ‘woooah it’s like a Ken Loach film!’

Def Voltron, we’re on that positive tip.

I’m not sure yet, workinonit! Hopefully two laptops in perfect harmony! A lot of lazer sounds.

I’m not sure, I guess with so much over saturation they can be good presenters of music to people. Mooncircle for example have a strong sense of who they are musically and aesthetically which I think you need. They know what they like and they get on with it, I respect that. I hate labels that fuck about, like there’s time for that in today’s world. I guess labels are very much tastemakers now. Like Flau are one of my favourite labels, I trust whatever they do is going to be a certain level of quality and share a particular vibe. Same with Black Acre, it works. I’m not particularly label minded as a fan of music though, I’ll dig for new music anywhere. But a great label is a beautiful and useful thing for sure.

I’ll tell you one. When you visit the Ghibli museum in Tokyo one of the few other animation companies you’ll find in their shop are Aardman, which made me kinda proud. It’s like loads of Totoros and then suddenly a bunch of Wallace and Gromit stuff, haha. Now that would be a dope collaboration! How amazing would that be?

I wanna see all the Hoya guys in cosplay, aaaahahahhaha! Actually, I really don’t… o-O