The Osaka DJ favors long, gradual mixes and careful pairings. His new mix album for Singapore’s Midnight Shift is a hypnotic descent into ambient, drone, and noise.
Some DJs are party starters; some are storytellers; some are historians, keepers of dance music’s flame. ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U can be all of these, but he is also something like a combination of shaman, warrior, and trickster. Often shirtless, sweat-slicked, and enviably ripped, the Osaka native (aka Yousuke Yukimatsu) brings an unusually furious versatility to the decks. Or is it an unusually versatile fury? In the first 13 minutes of a special Boiler Room Tokyo session in late 2020, he kicked off with Moby’s 1993 hardcore anthem “Thousand,” whose apocalyptic stabs and accelerating rhythm—its 1,000-plus beats per minute once landed it in the Guinness Book of World Records—suggest the earth is about to swallow the dancefloor whole. From there Yukimatsu feinted sideways into a stretch of squelchy, insouciant bass music, before diving headfirst into the extreme-noise hellscape of Nairobi metal duo Duma’s “Lionsblood.” Over the full hour and a half, he switchbacked across vintage breakbeat hardcore, cutting-edge Tanzanian singeli, the Weeknd’s Daft Punk collab “I Feel It Coming,” and the theme from Rocky before closing with Jamie xx’s dreamily optimistic “Good Times,” the polar opposite of Moby’s hymn for the end of days.
But for all the seismic instability of the terrain, the aura Yukimatsu conjures in his wide-ranging sets is as enveloping as the most linear techno. Done wrong, self-conscious eclecticism can have a way of jolting listeners out of their trance, but Yukimatsu lowers you right down inside the fault line and leaves you vibrating. On his new mix album for Singapore’s Midnight Shift label, Yukimatsu tightens his focus and burrows into his contemplative side. A hypnotic descent into ambient, drone, and noise, Midnight Is Comin’ is one of the most immersive DJ mixes in recent memory. There are no breakbeats, no rave stabs, no pop curveballs. All but one of the tracks, most by relatively obscure Japanese experimental musicians, are exclusive to the mix. The mood throughout is shadowy and pensive; sounds range from dentist-drill buzz to acoustic guitar and angel choir, but they share a slow-burning intensity.
There are hints of Yukimatsu’s noise inclinations in the opening track, “Nagel,” by Orhythmo, a duo with punk and grindcore roots: Ominous clanking and shuffling footsteps lead us into a chamber of rapidly oscillating frequencies, and deep in the mix, a terrifying voice emerges through white-hot distortion, half whisper and half scream. But the mood gradually mellows as the cello-like tones of Ryo Murakami’s “Reminiscence” bleed into the frame, establishing what will become the dominant themes and textures of the mix: long, held tones; graceful, arpeggiated counterpoints; and a foggy, almost mystical air. At any moment, you sense that some fantastical shape might materialize from the murk, yet by and large, there are no major events, no sudden revelations. The atmosphere simply thickens and churns.
Yukimatsu’s blends are almost imperceptible, but they’re also deeply satisfying: When the doleful tones of “Reminiscence” come oozing into earshot, tempering the metallic harshness all around, you can practically feel your pulse slowing. He favors long, gradual mixes and careful pairings where it’s difficult to tease out where one track ends and the next begins. Much of that comes down to his sleight of hand. Outside the fabric of the mix, the rippling noises of Compuna’s “Flowmotion,” like a duet for cicada and helicopter, would seem to have little in common with the gothic ambient folk of French musician Coni’s “Ängelsbäcksstrand,” which even quotes a few lines from Bob Dylan’s “In My Time of Dying.” Yet the way they’re mixed, they feel like two parts of one process, overlapping legs of a single journey.
The switchbacks become more pronounced toward the end. That gently incongruous Coni song, which resembles a doomier This Mortal Coil, melts into Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi’s “Kisah,” which sounds like a strange mashup of religious singing and needle-nosed rave stabs; that track abruptly slips into Osaka producer SPINNUTS’ “Zweimal schlafen atmosphere,” a pitch-perfect evocation of the minimalist dub techno practiced by artists like Pole and Thomas Brinkmann around the turn of the millennium. It is the lone beat on the album, and it is rendered in such chilly, skeletal black and white, it’s more like a techno X-ray than a living groove. Given Yukimatsu’s hell-for-leather club tendencies, this slow, skulking rhythm is a striking display of restraint. From here, he might have gone anywhere; instead, he concludes the mix with a gorgeous unfurling of soft piano chords and gently colored synthesizers. Just like the conclusion to his Boiler Room set, it is the perfect inverse of his opening selection—the kink in the moebius strip that brings us full circle in Yukimatsu’s exquisitely twisted world.
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