The end of summer fills me with sweet, aching melancholy, and the perfect company for that beautiful sadness is the music of Japanese producer Soshi Takeda.
Takeda employs analog hardware to painstakingly recreate 1980s new age sounds and vintage house grooves, creating something new and fresh in the process – a “post-vaporwave take on deep house”, as writer Sam Gardner has called it, adding that “his dance music feels meant for meditation more than actual dancing.”
In the Bandcamp blurbs to his albums, Takeda is quoted with mission statements based on adjective pairs like “cool and exotic”. “When I listen to beautiful deep house, I feel a mysterious atmosphere”, he says. “Dreamy scenes come to mind. I aim to create that sound.”
Not much is known about Takeda’s biography, and the few available facts mostly come from a brief 2024 interview in the
newsletter. Apparently, his mother was a violinist, so he’s likely to have grown up around music. Spending his childhood just outside of Tokyo, he only moved to the city after marrying his wife.The Japanese blurb for his debut album Memory of Humidity seems to say that Takeda was in a university campus clique of long-haired vegan skateboarders playing Moodymann on their boomboxes, which is one of the weirdest things I’ve heard recently.
To explore Takeda’s musical influences, I’ve shazam’ed through two of his DJ mixes and found a lot of classic house, some disco and mid-tempo r&b jams, and a lot of what I’d call neo-Balearic beat from the last decade – think Space Ghost, Brijean, Patrick Holland and the Coastal Haze label. I’ve also found some classic and contemporary trance, some Sade, and Sting’s “Shape Of My Heart” mixed into Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams”.
While still in university, Takeda began making simple techno tracks in GarageBand, before getting into collecting hardware – synthesizers, samplers, sequencers and drum computers – to create music like his past heroes from Chicago, Detroit and New York.
Takeda has been releasing music since 2017, starting with a few Bandcamp loosies. He’s been referring to his four main releases since 2020 as his actual ‘albums’, though they rather fit the standard definition of EPs – they all have six tracks and runtimes of 25 to 40 minutes.
Memory of Humidity (Dotei, 2020)
Takeda’s first album, a tape release, gives strong vaporwave / future funk vibes, with its sound palette harking back to 1980s production values (think fat moog basslines and colourful synth textures). The tape’s title references the era of social distancing, when touching and feeling other human bodies remained just a distant memory for many of us – though it might as well relate to “the feeling of dampness that can be obtained in a resort in Southeast Asia,” as the poetic blurb explains. “For others, it may be the feeling of drinking canned beer in front of Seven-Eleven.”
Floating Mountains (100% Silk, 2021)
Takeda’s second album came out on vinyl and was inspired by a photography book of Chinese landscapes. Retaining his trademark melancholy, this collection feels more upbeat from the start. One of the obvious influences here is Larry Heard – not the early Mr Fingers tunes, but the two album volumes of Sceneries Not Songs, building arcs from house to downtempo. With its introverted, thoughtful atmosphere, this music doesn’t really seem to cater to sweaty club dancefloors. A poolside daytime disco, maybe – or an imaginary Paradise Garage.
Same Place, Another Time (Constellation Tatsu, 2022)
Takeda’s third album, another tape release, captures the gentle, dreamy vibe of Éric Rohmer films set in Mediterranean vacation resorts. This feels closer in spirit to Memory of Humidity than to Floating Mountains, due to less obvious house references and stronger chillout vibes in standout tracks like “Blue Dress” and the title cut. An album-length excursion into Pure Moods / Café del Mar territory with sugary melodies and airy percussion, but somehow, in Takeda’s hands, the most obvious clichés and sonic tropes turn into something heartfelt and earnest.
Secret Communication (100% Silk, 2024)
On this most recent vinyl six-tracker, he continues the direction explored on Floating Mountains, inspired by jazzy underground house music from the 1990s. In the period of this album’s creation, the world kept destabilizing through wars and conflicts, while Takeda’s personal life changed quite drastically as well – he became a father. The music seems to reflect that ambiguity by allowing contradictory emotions to exist at the same time, without ever trying to resolve that conflict. It conveys a sense of finding comfort and acceptance in the midst of the chaos and confusion, which makes it deeply human despite its tonal artificiality.