Courtesy of AVEX Entertainment

Shinichi Osawa’s influence on the Japanese music scene runs deep. From his influential ’90s club jazz act Mondo Grosso to producing hit albums for J-pop divas UA, Bird and Chara and on to his current DJ residency at Shibuya club Womb, the man seems to be everywhere.

Met in the flesh for the first time at the bustling Aoyama offices of his new record company Avex, the Kyoto native proves to be a compact, smart-yet-casually dressed 40-year-old with an unassuming sense of himself—but a sure sense of what he has to say when the subject is music.

The topic of discussion today is Osawa’s new album The One, which amazingly is the first under his own name in a nearly 20-year career. But before we turn to the record, I ask Osawa for a reality check on the current state of J-pop. “At the end of the ’90s, I felt like there was a lot of really good J-pop being made,” he reflects, “and it was being understood by a broad section of listeners. But to be frank, the kind of J-pop that’s selling now is awful.”

“There are waves,” he continues. “Since the ’60s it’s gotten better and then worse again. In the ’80s, for example, when YMO appeared, things seemed to be getting better, but then toward the end of the decade typical kayoukyoku [formulaic, sentimental pop] began to sell again. The present doesn’t look very good, and the people who are buying CDs don’t seem to have much taste.”

Partly for this reason, Osawa now has his own label, Fearless, through which he’s released his recent music. “I created my own imprint because I didn’t want to be identified with other sometimes-terrible groups on the major labels,” he explains. “Avex is good overall, but it’s weird to be on Avex and be grouped together with someone like Kumi Koda.”

Despite having produced some of the biggest divas in J-pop of the last decade, Osawa came to much of it by chance. Bird was the only singer he “discovered” in the traditional sense. “With Bird, I really found her as an amateur and thought I wanted to work with her, but others have been introduced by friends. I don’t search for artists, so in that sense I’m not really a professional producer.”

With one exception, Japanese singers are noticeably absent on The One. The album launches with a cover of The Chemical Brothers’ “Star Guitar” featuring female New York trio Au Revoir Simone. It’s a searing, electro update of a classic techno track, and indicative of the course Osawa has been taking recently in his own music and residency at Womb.

It is also in some ways a return to the music Osawa was listening to in Kyoto before heading off in the acid jazz direction pioneered in Japan by Mondo Grosso. Despite the jazz leanings of influential Kyoto DJs, including Kyoto Jazz Massive and Fantastic Plastic Machine, he says there wasn’t a club jazz scene in the ancient capital per se. “Rather, there was a New Wave scene that I was exposed to in my teens, and that was the stronger influence,” he recalls. “But by ‘New Wave,’ I mean less a genre of music than an attitude, a way of thinking, that contained strains of jazz, Latin, punk. It was quite a broad scene.”

Some of the other vocalists featured on an album that filters post-punk New Wave sensibilities through cutting-edge production techniques include Princess Superstar, Rubies, Ania, Freeform Five and Nelson. “Most of them were introduced by friends,” he says.

“It was a natural process. There were songs, for instance, where I initially had vocalists but then decided to keep them instrumental: it wasn’t a ‘featuring’ type approach.”

While the album makes an impact on the home stereo, the best place to hear these tracks is through the massive sound system at Womb, where Osawa continually updates and manipulates his music for discerning clubbers. Despite some who look back nostalgically on the early days of clubbing in Japan a decade or two ago, Osawa is upbeat. “I think the current club scene is getting better,” he says. “It isn’t something underground or elitist anymore, and it’s easy for anyone to get in... Japanese clubbers understand music well and choose their parties accordingly.”

A fashionable man whose events tend to attract fashionable people, Osawa recently debuted The One at an event presented by French fashion house Zadig & Voltaire in the garage of Avex Entertainment, with impossibly leggy models flaunting the latest glammy looks on a grand runway. But Osawa has mixed feelings about the music-fashion connection. “If people harden their attitudes about music based on looks, it’s not a good thing,” he opines. “They should have a looser interrelation, rather than the current scene where you can tell if a guy is wearing skinny pants that he’s going to be listening to electro-rock, or that if he has messy hair he’ll be listening to UK garage-rock.”

While Osawa says his next project may move from track-making to a more songwriter-like approach, one thing you can be sure of is that he won’t follow the course of many producers who release solo albums. “I’m listening to a lot of neo-folk: Efterklang, Kings of Convenience... stuff from northern Europe,” he says. “I might do something like that. But I won’t be singing.”

The One is available on Cutting Edge/Avex. For gig info see www.mondogrosso.com.

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