The past is sometimes said to be a foreign country, and for the mature musician, the chances of going there tend to be especially remote. If nations typically enjoy the assumption of stability, a music scene’s own monuments—genres, labels, magazines, record shops, nightclubs—are more easily toppled. Tastes change. Flats rise. Luck rots. What remains when the cliques and dancefloors of your youth have disappeared? Something along these lines seemed to cross Soichi Terada’s mind one day a few years ago in Wakasu Seaside Park, a waterfront he used to cycle to whenever he’d “run out of ideas to compose.” As he lay on the grass, his arms outstretched on turf where landfill once stood, he said, “I am trying to remember some of the places I used to go to during the ’90s. However, most of them are clubs that have closed or changed location… In the end, change might be the most appropriate word to describe Tokyo’s scenery.”
The passport to remembering is full of fading stamps. But Asakusa Light attempts to be the exception. Over an 18 month period, Terada challenged himself to “[recall] my feelings from 30 years ago” and distil them across an album of deep house, his first full-length of new material in more than two decades. In the early ’90s, Terada was making music with an impressive fidelity to the stuff circulating in New York (this 1987 classic, “The Morning After” by Lenny Dee and Tommy Musto, is what you might call proto-Terada). Soon, though, he emerged with a covetable sound of his own; in the year before his death, Larry Levan, one of Terada’s heroes, remixed the wonderful “Sun Shower,” which began with his own voicemail to the Japanese artist: “Mr. Terada, I need to know the key of your fuckin’ song.” (It’s B minor.) Whatever the mode, the thing about Terada’s music, and especially the karaoke perfection of “Sun Shower,” is that it sounds extremely grateful to exist.
You can hear this urgency even on one of Terada’s moodier classics, “Low Tension,” where, amid smoky trails of synth bass, flute, and horn, Rhodesy keys fluttered with a bird-of-paradise grace. This is more or less the mood in which Asakusa Light begins. “Silent Chord”—which, like “Low Tension,” has that deeply satisfying synth-bass chug—opens with a warbling minor chord and a tinkly iPhone alarm-clock tone, whose effect resembles a shy optimism for the day ahead. This generosity of spirit flows throughout the album. Terada shows it most obviously on the next track, “Double Spire,” whose inquisitive piano figures and glissing space-disco pads are surprisingly reminiscent of Lindstrøm, and the fourth, “Diving Into Minds,” where happy-to-be-here chords and another deep bassline glide through undulating synth canopies. Whenever Asakusa Light evokes a feeling of flight, the ride is reassuringly smooth.