By his own admission, Shintaro Haioka was a late bloomer. The 32-year-old producer, one of only two Japanese artists taking part in the upcoming Red Bull Music Academy Tokyo, says he was an avid music fan as a teenager ¡ª but a lousy musician.
¡°I¡¯m completely tone-deaf,¡± he says. ¡°I don¡¯t have any sense of rhythm and I¡¯m a terrible dancer. I¡¯m too embarrassed to go to karaoke, even.¡±
Only after discovering the liberating power of music technology, with its sequencers and quantized rhythms, did Haioka embark on his present career. In his early 20s, he joined Bremen, a pop-savvy dance-rock trio who skirted the periphery of mainstream success during the 2000s, even snagging a slot at the Summer Sonic music festival in 2006.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.