Susumu Hirasawa was born breech[1] at a paper mill warehouse in Nagato (長門町, now part of Nakagawa), near the border with Kameari, subdivisions both in the northwestern part of Tokyo's Shitamachi area.[2][3] The second son of a firefighter and a housewife,[4] the Hirasawas were middle class in the community,[5] residing in a house Susumu called "good enough to live alone, but astonishingly small".[a][2] Susumu studied at Sannō Nursery (山王保育園), Nagato Elementary (enrolled 1960), The 12th Junior High (enrolled 1966) and the electronics course of Honjo Technical High (enrolled 1969).[6][7] He never fit socially in school: in elementary, due to his dislike of traditionally masculine brashness and loudness, he almost exclusively played with girls.[1] An introvert with "a timid, shy personality",[b][8] he often played alone after classes.[8]
Hirasawa's parents were often concerned about him growing up, mainly due to a strange condition. From toddlerdom up to 1970, he had constant recurring abstract dreams that intensely scared him. In the earliest cases, he was unable to differentiate them from reality; his parents took him to a hospital, but doctors could not pinpoint the cause.[8] Hirasawa lied when asked to tell what happened in the dreams because he thought the truth would make people think he was insane. The hospital subjected him to various tests, an experience that was "pretty traumatic for a child".[c][1] By 1967, the dreams would happen once every two months; and caused high fevers, panic attacks and the sense of being tied inside a metal box.[1] In the mid-'60s, he went to a psychiatrist by himself to discover their meaning but got treated dismissively.[9] Around the same time, his mother turned to Kannon for help.[10] By 1972, he turned to the writings of Sigmund Freud and meditation; he had acquired the ability to stop the dreams partway through, and they ceased.[7]
Hirasawa spent all of his childhood in Kameari and its surroundings, only exploring beyond it after entering junior high.[2] Substantially populated by Yakuza, the disabled and eccentrics,[5] he has called it "a strange neighborhood where those that should have been discarded by modernized cities co-existed with residents",[d][2] but also estimated the region "had a great impact on the development of my psyche".[e][2] An area with a heavy industrial presence, he would often play near various factories in his infancy. The unique devices he spotted around a Hitachi plant, in particular, were the first to instill an appreciation for technology in him.[11][12][7]
One of Hirasawa's favorite childhood hobbies was building and flying RC planes, to the point of wanting to become a pilot. Both he and his parents expected he would become an engineer due to his love of machines:[11][7] for toys, they gave him broken appliances that he would fix. In high school, he was the first of his class to finish their graduation project (build a properly working television) despite not understanding some circuits.[13]
In the '50s, visiting a neighbor, Hirasawa had his first experience with a musical instrument, playing the family organ. After that, he begged his parents to buy one; both refused because "back then, a man learning to play the organ was considered outrageous".[f][4] In school, he loathed music classes, as he disliked singing in front of or in unison with others, as well as the songs they had to perform: "Thanks to that, I learned to despise music".[g][1][14] In 1964, as Japan underwent the electric boom, Hirasawa—drawn to instrumental surf bands The Spotnicks and The Atlantics—bought his first electric guitar. He was fascinated by their shapes and colors, and the ways they could make noise. The visual interest was drastic: "Even though there was no information on how to modify a guitar, I wanted to change the design. The guitar would end up sounding worse. But I didn’t care about the sound".[h][10] He even built two originals in his elementary years.[8][10] He hid the musical hobby from others, feeling his passion for lesser-known bands would make it harder to explain himself and make him misunderstood.[9][14]
By 1965, Hirasawa was "drafted" into his first band; all other members were high schoolers. They never performed shows but would attract crowds at weekly rehearsals in public spaces.[15] In 1966, through a misunderstanding, he met the drummer Furukawa (古川), of Kabara Junior High. They formed a band with others, also from different junior high schools.[14][16] With a repertoire of covers, they performed as sideshows at unconventional venues. In December 1967, at a batting centre Christmas party, they were the opening act for the semi-pro band Doctors (ドクターズ, Dokutāzu), a predecessor of Group Sounds band The Lind & Linders. Hirasawa felt inferior in comparison,[17] but the Doctors' guitarist Nagai (永井) thought he had potential, due to what Hirasawa considers "deceit": light gauge guitar strings were rare in Japan, which made bending difficult; to string his guitars, Hirasawa would forgo the top one (the thickest) and double the bottom one (the thinnest), which led to a bending-heavy playstyle.[13] Nagai became a mentor to Hirasawa; exposing him to psychedelic, blues and R&B bands from the anglosphere that were popular in the west but still unknown in Japan; and pushed him towards songwriting.[18][9]
As Hirasawa developed his approach to musicianship, he found himself with no playing opportunities starting high school. Nagai had a strongly anti-commercialist approach to music; as Hirasawa followed suit, his interest in his band waned due to his colleagues preferring the opposite, so he left it. At the same time, he was underage, and therefore unhirable by the owners of discos that Nagai played on. Without alternatives, he swapped his hobby from music to motocross, because a friend joined a local team.[19][18] He still listened to music, but his urge to perform would only return in either 1970 or 1971. He befriended an electronic engineer audiophile classmate, who made a school festival presentation where Hirasawa demonstrated a multitrack recording setup he designed. As they worked on it, he built Hirasawa a transmitter to make them on his own.[7]
As band activities developed, Hirasawa faced massive societal changes that molded his values. Modernization via the construction of high-rise apartment buildings and major chain supermarkets gradually eroded the character of Kameari away, right as he came to appreciate the area.[2] The community rid the area of yakuza presence, but some became religious zealots and drove many residents away, like Hirasawa's parents, who moved to Mabashi, Chiba Prefecture in the '70s due to constant harassment.[20][2][1] The televised Zenkyōtō and other such student protests of the era—alongside the retaliatory police brutality—led to a distrust of mass media, and a realization that technology can further violence.[12] Of significant influence on his views was his brother, Yūichi (平沢 裕一, born 5 October 1950), who spent some years living at a commune in Kyoto as hippie culture gained traction and partook in the sociopolitical movement. He indirectly led Susumu to study the issues on his own[21] and directly pushed him to read books, who did not until the very end of high school.[4]
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Main article: Mandrake (Japanese band) |
In spring 1972, Hirasawa was approached by Fumiyasu Abe (安部 文泰) of Kyōbashi Commercial High, who asked to form a band together. Abe was part of a school club band, but he too was not satisfied due to a diverging taste. He was acquaintances with Nagai, who advised him to seek out Hirasawa. Abe's request was turned down, but Hirasawa was intrigued at his aim to play "deranged music".[i][22] Not long after, he was hit by a truck that ran a red light, totaling his motorcycle. Lacking money to fix it, he took up the proposal.[7]
Abe wanted to pursue a professional career in music, an idea Hirasawa acclimated to as they worked together. Their first attempt was an improvisational blues/electronic band, using devices built by Hirasawa's classmate and with Furukawa on drums, which only lasted for one concert. The duo spent the rest of the year fruitlessly scouting for like-minded fellows to form a band.[7] In 1973, a flyer of theirs soliciting musicians to play heavy rock[22] was answered by two men—one of them Yasumi Tanaka (田中 靖美)— who met at Higashi-Koganei Station.[23][24] This band, named "Mandrake" by Abe and Hirasawa, quickly gravitated towards progressive rock; Abe left it through unusual circumstances—Hirasawa (who became their new vocalist against his wishes), the other members and a stage crew carried on with prog for the next five years.
Hirasawa juggled his band activities throughout this period with studies and part-time jobs. He enrolled in the interior design department of Tokyo Designer Gakuin College in 1973: "I studied at a technical high school, so I was good with electronics. I thought I should balance it out by fulfilling my artistic desires".[j][24] He graduated with honors in 1975, his graduation project Hall for Tangerine Dream — The Return to Space Consciousness from the Womb (胎内から宇宙意識への回帰), a dome-shaped concert stage set, earned an award from the principal.[25] During college, he worked as a courier at a fruit and vegetable market[24] by day and at a Pepsi warehouse by night[26][27] at first, then at a bookbinding factory that handled medical tomes,[28] and after graduating as a building cleaner.[29]
Hirasawa was invited to perform one concert with a band formed by Nippon Steel employees, whose setlist consisted of plagiarized Genesis songs about love affairs, in Makuhari. The organizer asked him to open the show with "Echoes". The band's leader later invited him to join as they were about to make an album but was turned down due to creative differences.[30]
In early 1978, Hirasawa took a job offer for synthesizer demonstrator at Yamaha's Ginza store, and as the sole applicant, was hired. He never played or owned one before, but knew how to operate one from reading multiple books on Moog synths. He did well but only lasted three days at the job: his superior, Akiro Kamio Arishima (有島 神尾 明朗), drafted him as a junior member of the Electro Sound (エレクトロサウンド) corporation.[31] One of the few independent synthesizer-centric studios in Japan at the time[32]—handling artistic, commercial and educational work—Hirasawa worked as a support member of the company's experimental band The Bach Revolution (バッハ・リヴォリューション, Bahha Rivoryūshon), Yamaha Music Foundation teacher, programmer and soundtrack composer/performer.[29]
At the same time Kamio offered him work, he also advised Hirasawa to enter a Weekly Playboy contest offering free synthesizers to talented amateurs who submitted high-quality multitrack recordings;[31][29] The Bach Revolution was part of the judging panel that selected the winners.[33][31] His attempt, "Temptation from Necessity Bees" (いりよう蜂の誘惑), was praised by head judge Isao Tomita: "Outstanding composition. Top-level for a piece by an amateur. [...] It’s rich in wit, and the idea is great. There is a solid understanding of sound making. Perhaps calling him amateur would be impolite, so it would be better to call him a professional".[k][34] It, and all other winning entries, were released that same year as the compilation Synthetic Space (恐るべき頭脳集団), Hirasawa's first solo outing.[35] That album's liner notes include short comments from each amateur on their creation; Hirasawa's is one of the earliest published examples of his unique prose.[36][37]
His first soundtrack commission was for the Nippon Broadcasting radio drama Drama House at Night : "I made about 20 sound effects for them every week. This was a very tiresome task".[l][38]
Over its 6 years of existence, Mandrake gradually accrued a following in the Tokyo prog scene,[30] but found differences in worldview towards other bands[39][40][41] and the lack of growth prospects frustrating.[42][29] Simultaneously, they gradually cottoned to the punk and new wave movements developing in the west.[43] Hirasawa felt new wave was a genre with a meaning behind it, and as he listened to more of it concluded he could make it with the same motivation that led him to prog.[44] Besides the hands-on experience Electro Sound's assignments provided, it also allowed Hirasawa and Tanaka to develop a new approach to synths.[45] The two wrote many new wave songs with this new sound, which Hirasawa thought had mainstream potential,[29] with lyrics reflecting an Orwellian sense of hopelessness towards the changes Tokyo was going through.[46] With all interest in the genre gone, they turned down an offer from Victor Music Industries and chose to end the band, playing their prog repertoire for the last time on a New Year's Eve 1978 show.[47][48][49][50]
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Main article: P-Model |
Hours later, on New Year's Day 1979, the bandmembers and Yūichi convened to define how they'd pursue their new direction.[51] The decision was to change the band's name to evoke a mass-produced industrial good,[51] and cultivate an unthreatening image while keeping a punk feel, with the ultimate goal of "overthrowing Pink Lady".[52] Staunchly against belonging to a talent firm,[53][50] the band instead created a self-owned office, Model House. By 1980, P-Model found itself in the midst of a techno-pop boom, with two commercially successful albums, frequent media coverage and large concert attendance.[54]
The band got signed to a label with help from an editor of Rockin' f magazine, which occasionally hired Hirasawa to contribute album reviews. Technical articles done with Electro Sound were published before, but these—as well as interviews across multiple publications—platformed his peculiar prose and worldview. Gradually, he acquired a public image as a charismatic personality.[55] Not long after, it also grew to his being perceived as a serious, strict and humorless man.[56]
Hirasawa's concurrent Electro Sound output includes notable soundtrack work. "Power Hall" (パワー・ホール), the entrance theme for then New Japan Pro-Wrestling up-and-comer fighter Riki Choshu, was written and recorded in a single day[57] by a disinterested Hirasawa, who finds it "obviously shoddy", insisted on using pseudonyms, sold his rights away and disowned the song.[38][35][58][59] As Choshu's celebrity grew, it became one of his best-known songs. His first anime score the Go Nagai puppetry space opera X-Bomber, for which he contributed three songs.[60] Providing sound effects and music with seven synthesizers each, he and Kamio accompanied storyteller Sanyutei Enjo in the first-ever synth rakugo routine, both live performance and on TV.[61][38][62]
Hirasawa found himself in a state of crisis towards P-Model, uncomfortable with the way mass media and audiences framed the band as idols,[54] a lack of interest in making more music centred around social critique[63] and the realization that they were treated as a fad.[54] New types of picturesque dreams with recurring imagery came to him again continually through the '80s. Feeling they'd be swept aside once the boom ended, P-Model counteracted with an overt change in style, pursuing heavy post-punk with surrealist lyrics, often with an experimental approach, that got heavier and darker over the years.[54][64] The shift worked: most of the fanbase abandoned them and most of the press ignored them. Around the same time, Electro Sound dispersed;[65] most of P-Model's music revenue never reached the band from here on.[29] Hirasawa was the poorest he'd ever been in his life; band activities were juggled alongside non-public-facing part-time jobs as a debt collector chauffeur and utility pole climber at first. He grew more introspective around this time, which led to a growing interest in psychology, New Age and pseudoscience.[55]
1982 saw the start of Hirasawa's career accompanying other acts: Shampoo, an all-female duo formed by students of his Yamaha class, had one single and a various artists compilation contribution released that year, all produced and arranged by him; they planned to make a whole album, but it did not come to be.[66][60] It stays a minor facet of Hirasawa's output—almost entirely restricted to work by friends—due to a strong dislike of show business and an isolated position in the music industry borne from mutual enmity.[38][67] In 1983 he was the vocalist, guitarist and percussionist of Music & Words; a band formed with fellow former Electro Sound employees Kamio and Takashi Kokubo (小久保 隆). With a chaotic synth sound similar to what P-Model was doing at the time, they had a repertoire of seven songs and only played two shows. Their output was originally intended for a Kamio solo album,[68] also smitten by the punk movement, but did not find himself comfortable with that position, ultimately preferring to work behind the scenes.[65]
In 1983, he returned to music commissions, a prolific second job that ended in 1990. Some of Hirasawa's work in this line included scoring installations and trade presentations, but the majority were commercial jingles.[69] Early on, he participated in a doujin cassette event within the jingles field with "God Seiko the Queen"—"a song about the Sex Pistols opening the door into summer and saving Seiko",[m] made with punk instrumentation as well as Peter Gabriel and Seiko Matsuda samples—which won the grand prize.[70][71] Some of this commission work was released as Model House Works (MODEL HOUSE作品集), a cassette bundled with copies of the first volume of the official P-Model fan club newsletter (published circa 1985).[72] Jingle-making had a great influence on his style, as producer requests led him to handle approaches outside of his genre and different from his field.[73] However, he's not fond of this line of work, and found the environment foolish:
"There is a pile of synthesizers on-site for filming commercials. On top of that, the programmer is in charge of operating it, not you. It’s an over-exaggerated performance. The reason is to show clients and advertising firms that 'making synth music is very difficult' and get a budget. [Acting the part means] Something that can be done in 3 minutes is dragged on for an hour [laughs]. Like purposefully playing by hand a process that can be immediately done using a sequencer […] The clients listen to the song once the recording is close to being finished. They are usually a few people from the public relations department of companies, but they think that they have to say something because of their role, and sometimes make confusing requests. […] I will change the song as asked and prove that it will actually get distorted. Repeat this several times, deliver the product once they’re happy, and it’s done."[n][74]
March 1983 saw the sudden departure of Tanaka—who had as much creative say in P-Model as Hirasawa—from the field of professional music. Hirasawa found that a massive blow, comparable to losing an arm.[55] He would later say that "P-Model originally ended at that point".[75] The band's dynamic started to go through a definitive change: P-Model was originally established as a group of equals following a concept,[50] but Hirasawa increasingly took leadership as time went on.[76] That consolidation of creative control intensified after Tanaka left, with annual turnover until the end of the decade, and the press took to saying Hirasawa lead a "One-Man Band" (ワンマン・バンド, Wan Man Bando). Around this time, he felt stifled in all facets of life by his public image and wanted to rid himself of it, but felt he'd crossed a point of no return and was clueless.[56][55]
The money issues, loss of Tanaka, and record label conflicts took a toll on Hirasawa's mental health and he looked for ways to treat it. His first avenue was Silva Mind Control lectures and workshops,[55] which led to an interest in hypnosis, as well as attempts to incorporate brain wave control in his work: first with drum machine patterns in the bookending tracks of Another Game,[77] then an ultimately unproduced video of audio and visual stimuli to such ends.[78] By chance, while in a severe state, he saw an advert for a psychiatric practice, which he half-heartedly visited. There, he went through sessions with Toshiaki Minejima (峰島 敏彰)—a counselor who adhered to the work of Carl Jung—for around a year.[56] Minejima offered interpretations of his surrealist lyrics and, in light of his particular condition, suggested that Hirasawa start writing a dream diary. This counseling deeply affected Hirasawa: he kept writing dreams down for years,[79] and along with this, the books on analytical psychology he read would greatly influence his work.[55]
Hirasawa felt unable to continue the style P-Model had developed.[55] Experimental music continued with the side-project Shun, while P-Model turned to a different kind of pop on 1984's Scuba. With lyrics heavily influenced by Jungian themes which tie into an overarching story expanded in the booklet and minimal participation from other musicians, it was a watershed creation in Hirasawa's oeuvre, providing the fundamental direction of all the works that followed and sparking a wider interest in storytelling through music.[80][55] His interest in hypnosis manifested in the inclusion of a disk to induce analogous hypnosis in the booklet.[78] Band dynamics-wise, he fruitlessly chased the level of camaraderie that the early lineups had.[55] Songwriting-wise, he came up with unused material that didn't fit P-Model: "I think that I don’t care that much about my music compared to other people. I have a lot of music stocked, but I’ll record them, and the tapes will get all moldy, and the songs will never see the light of day. But I’m okay with that".[o][81]
Minejima worried that he'd taken the wrong direction with his treatment and changed Hirasawa too much, even offered to stop it partway through, but his patient felt it was necessary, to integrate many things into his character and deviate from his image as part of P-Model.[56][55] It allowed him to no longer feel beholden to the tenets that defined the band, and to not take his work so seriously.[56] The group's albums afterward strayed from following specific contexts, though Hirasawa tried to maintain that framework, if loosely. By 1986's One Pattern, there was no longer a single consistent compositional style among new songs. At the same time, he felt behold to keep P-Model going, to advance a frontwards technological sound and to attempt a return to the band's old dynamics. By mid-1988; facing issues finding a suitable new label for the band, financial as well as administrative pressures, and a lack of enthusiasm for its trajectory after multiple lineup changes; Hirasawa secretly gave up on P-Model and secretly prepared for a solo career, writing songs to that end and negotiating with record labels.[82] That year also saw the release of Charity Original Tape, a solo mini-album sold exclusively for one day on the Yoyogi flea market, containing a song written for the opening ceremonies of a Takayama volunteer welfare facility for people with mental illnesses run by Minejima, coupled with two long instrumentals to aid meditation, bundled with a booklet detailing Hirasawa's life[83]
Concurrently, Hirasawa sought to make computer animation on his own, in the same manner he was able to record music.[84] This led him to use the Amiga line of computers.[85] His first such release was a CG New Year card for 1989, available strictly by mail via reservation. It was announced via flyers distributed at P-Model's 28 December 1988,[86] which ended with Hirasawa announcing that the band would "enter cold sleep".[87] The video reasserted the end of the band, and confirmed that Hirasawa was going solo.[75]
Hirasawa signed to Polydor K.K. as a solo artist in April 1989 and proceeded to record his first album.[88] Water in Time and Space marked the beginning of Hirasawa's full exploration of songwriting interests, no longer bound by the need to match any particular band style or approriateness of an arrangement to be performed live by a quartet. Thematically, he further pursued his interests in widely disproved pseudoscience and alternative medicine, with the opening track written as a dedication to quack doctor Thomas Galen Hieronymus, inventor of the widely-disproven radionics-based Hieronymus machine.[89] That same year, he fired his then-manager for behavior that "could as well be called treason",[90] and in 1 October moved from self-run management to an outside office, I3 Promotion, as he was taken by the sincerity of its president, long time fan Yūichi Kenjo (見城 裕一).[91][92]