Judging from afar, by the composers and others who live there whom one comes across from time to time on systems like Youtube and Soundcloud, the musical scenes in Tokyo must be as diverse as they are inventive; one of them, Hayato Takeuchi (I recently heard of him via Luiz Henrique Yudo) has uploaded a number of tracks from which one can infer that his complete body of work manifests both of these qualities at once, and as such his activity is thoroughly idiosyncratic, on the one hand, while it may yet be, on the other, in some fashion representative of what’s going on musically in his city in general.
The sheer variety of those few tracks conveys some idea of what Takeuchi’s genreless music could comprise: and this is a body of work that might prove to be as little limited by nationality as it is by genre – in its very oddness it could travel abroad with ease.
Particularly odd and especially appealing is “Tomorrow/Farewell Song,” which is something like a Cajun tune d’un amour perdu – sung in Japanese. (What the lyrics actually speak of, is not something I can establish, to be sure, but the gist of it, I believe, does spring over the linguistic divide.)
And here are some of Takeuchi’s other pieces.
“The World of a Know It All.”
“The Fifth Area of Lunar Base.”
And “My Trash Travels in Space (in His Head).”