Words by Hinako Omori

It's been ten years since Japanese composer and producer Anchorsong’s first record, Chapters, was released in the UK. We've been eagerly anticipating his fourth album Mirage which is out now on Tru Thoughts.

Born in the beautiful nature-filled prefecture of Tokushima, Japan, Masaaki Yoshida’s inspiration from overseas artists – namely alternative rock bands such as Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins – spurred him to pick up the guitar. After relocating to Tokyo for university, Yoshida formed his first band with fellow university friends. Stylistically a mixture of rock and rap, the band never performed to the public throughout their four-year tenure, preferring instead to focus on their production in the studio. Following the departure of their vocalist, the band introduced more electronics instruments into the fold such as samplers and synthesisers, transforming musically into a type of ‘human breakbeat’.

Unfortunately, the band eventually split, and Yoshida decided to take over the band’s name “Anchorsong” and continue as a solo unit. “I didn’t want to be a singer-songwriter, because I cannot sing. DJ wasn’t an option for me because I was more into live music and wanted to perform with my hands. I didn’t want to use a laptop on stage for the same reason – I wanted to play physically.” This led Yoshida to choose MPC as his weapon of choice, which to this day has remained an indispensable instrument in Yoshida’s production and performing process.

The first MPC of Yoshida’s collection was the 2000XL – he started to record his own samples onto it using the instruments that he owned at the time – synthesizers, guitars, drum machines – to create his own palette of sounds. Beginning with recording one-shot samples – “I assigned each single note sample to each pad, and then I could play them with my fingers” – Yoshida gradually began to record in loop-based phrases to experiment with instead, for a more “organic, acoustic, human” feel.

Stylistically Yoshida was inspired by instrumental hip hop, and his solo project began to morph sonically in this direction. Yoshida stayed in Tokyo for three further years and began to perform and play his new material in public, whilst saving to pursue his ambition to move to London – “because most of my favourite musicians are from there”.

Arriving in London in 2007 with a fresh start, Yoshida started frequenting shows, bringing his demo CDs in tow to pass onto local promoters. This was the catalyst in forming his close relationship with Soundcrash – “they were doing a lot of shows in London, so I always wanted to play for one of their shows.” After a few conversations with the founder of Soundcrash, Yoshida was booked for his first UK show at Cargo. Yoshida subsequently began to play Soundcrash shows regularly. After a year or two, he secured a deal for his first release with Tru Thoughts, Chapters, in 2011.

After a flurry of touring including opening for artists such as DJ Krush, Bonobo, and Daedelus, SXSW, and an unforgettable performance for Boiler Room, Yoshida cemented global recognition for his inimitable and inventive live shows featuring his faithful MPC. He returned to Japan in 2013 because of a situation out of his hands and spent the next 3 years there. Yoshida continued working on material which became his second record Ceremonial – and after returning to the UK in 2016, he toured Ceremonial, released his third record Cohesion in 2018, and was just beginning to start working on his next record in his home studio – “and then the pandemic hit."

At this point, Yoshida had written roughly a third of the following album and had already decided to move away from specific geographical references following his previous records (Ceremonial was inspired by 70s African music, and Cohesion by traditional Indian percussion and 70s and 80s Bollywood film soundtracks).

When the lockdown started, it literally took away Yoshida’s opportunity to travel, spurring him to wander his mind even further and create imaginary landscapes. “While I was working, I was thinking about places I’d never been to, or places I wanted to go to someday – or maybe even places I’d been to. That’s all I could do because we actually couldn’t travel. I began to think about all kinds of places – sometimes going to Google Earth and just walk around the place and look for inspiring landscape images. Not necessarily for the sake of my record – I just wanted to have the stimulation. It might have helped to diverse my record even further.”

This was certainly the case – Yoshida’s new record Mirage is beautifully transporting, using carefully curated sounds and samples to create wonderful and vast sonic atmospheres, and an overarching uplifting feeling of hope. The title itself suggests an illusion – an unattainable, fantasy world.

When asked about the starting point of a project and inspiration, Yoshida answers “looking for a phrase that inspires me – and that usually becomes my first step of making a track.” This process is very apparent in Horseback. Using an archived sample of clattering horseshoes recorded in Mongol, Yoshida paired this together with kicks, snares, and other percussion to create a meditative loop that carries us running throughout the track. “The sound file was recorded in such bad quality, quite old too. I thought I wouldn't be able to use it even though I liked the sound. But amazingly, a few seconds became perfectly clean without any other noise – like magic! So it’s just two or three seconds [of it] that became the beat."

The use of field recordings to further enhance the atmosphere also appears in Saudade, where Yoshida’s imagination of being immersed in Brazilian landscapes led to a sample of rainfall recorded in the Amazon being used as a continuous sonic undercurrent – subtle, and hypnotic.

The Ocean sees Yoshida’s first collaboration with a guest artist on his own material. Using a recording of an entrancing poem by a friend Bookend, Yoshida created an immersive soundtrack inspired by the phonetics and sounds of Bookend’s voice and verse.  “She likes to make poetry, and record it when she’s inspired. Sometimes she sends it over to me without any particular purpose – so it wasn’t necessarily just for making music together.”

Since Yoshida started producing, he has ended up selecting a few key pieces of equipment to fine-tune his “compact” setup – namely the Roland Integra 7, Yamaha Motif-Rack XS, MPC 2500, and a Roland MIDI keyboard. “I used to have more gear – but the more I make music, the more I began to understand what I need and what I don’t.”

“I just realised I’m more into the sound of acoustic instruments. I still use a few electronics, of course, to support the ensemble – but it takes a small percentage of my production. I just thought I don’t have to have a massive synthesizer in my room anymore!”

Yoshida’s main go-to synthesiser is the rack-mounted Roland Integra 7, which he has been using for the last five years to create his organic sound world. “It basically has all the sounds that Roland has created over all these years – everything just in that one module. That module is a very big part of this new record actually – a lot of instrument samples came from that module.”

On Mirage, Yoshida experiments with the sound of the human voice – “It’s one of the most universal sounds. It’s the most fundamental, primal instrument”. Searching for a sound to replace strings or synthesiser pads to support the already-existing ensemble of wind instruments, bass, and drums, the sound of a choir matched perfectly and subsequently became a key element of the record.

In terms of the production process, MPC is very instrumental in Yoshida’s workflow, serving as a central ‘processor’. After choosing the samples to work with, Yoshida sometimes passes them through MPC to add some character and a certain “organic touch” before importing it into Logic, his main DAW. “If the sample is pretty old, then if it has to be polished rather than making it ‘dirty’, then I think I put it into my computer straight away – but if the sample is too ‘clean’, then I put it into MPC first, and I apply some filters and FX, and then eventually put it into the computer.”

When it comes to translating the music to a live performance, Yoshida still prefers to stay clear of the laptop and follow his original methods – and due to this, MPC inspires the production process in an almost reverse engineering way. “I put everything into MPC. In that sense, even when I’m producing I’m not using MPC in a technical way I always have this idea that all the songs I make, I eventually want to perform in my usual style – pretty much an MPC and maybe just one small synthesizer. It kind of serves as a limit to what kind of music I can make.”

“Because what MPC can do is pretty limited compared to a laptop and DAW, if I wanted to perform with MPC, it has to be minimal, repetitive, and simple. That makes me focus on what kind of music I should make. In that sense, MPC is still taking the central part of my musical creativity. Even though it’s not serving technically, in terms of the concept, MPC is still the core of my music.”

The sonic environment of Mirage flits between one that is very close, nostalgic, and familiar, suddenly opening up and expanding to a huge, vast space, with different textures, loops, and rhythms weaving in and out like an auditory tapestry – so especially during these times of lockdown and feeling confined, it transports you away on an adventure to a new realm.

“That’s definitely what I’m hoping for this record. If the people who listen to this record – if they can run their imagination as wild as I did, then the record probably achieves my goal. That’s what I experienced while I was making the record – so if somebody could experience something similar, that would be the perfect outcome for me.”