Eat, sleep, rave…make peace! DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu’s mission to change the world through topless rave | Dance music

TSeveral years ago this month, Japanese DJ Yusuke Yukimatsu suffered an epileptic seizure. When he didn’t show up to book the festival, organizers called his friends in Osaka, who found him exhausted at home. He was taken to hospital where doctors diagnosed him with a brain tumor. “If no one had contacted me, I probably would have died,” he posted on a crowdfunding platform several months later.

In the black-and-white photo accompanying a crowdfunding in support of his work, Yukimatsu tilts his head toward the camera, his buzzcut growing around a thick, jagged scar that curves from his left ear to the top of his hairline: He has undergone two craniotomy operations, as well as extensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The illness had also left him with the realization that he needed to make DJing his full-time job; To dedicate himself to his craft and make the world a better place. “If we can continue to live [for] “Tomorrow, if I can encourage people…that’s what I always try to do,” he says now. “The world is much worse off than it was when techno music was born. [in the mid 1980s]. Weapons are being developed. It became easier to commit a massacre. In Japan, if a musician talks about politics, he can be severely criticized. “But I think it’s really important to speak up.”

When I speak to Yukimatsu via video call, he’s between shows in Dublin and Barcelona as part of his current world tour; Later this summer, he will be the support act for Prodigy’s massive outdoor gigs in the UK. The 47-year-old is routinely touted as your favorite DJ, and his now-legendary set at November 2024 in Tokyo shows why: he’s approaching 20 million views, and is one of the most popular videos on the live dance streaming platform Boiler Room. At his best, the often shirtless Yukimatsu appears like a tight fist behind the deck, holding the crowd aloft as if by a string — and then bringing them down.

“That’s a good comparison!” He says. “I like very strong sounds and very emotional melodies. I want people to feel hope through my sets; I want to bring something like light to what I do.” That’s not to say he deals in generic aesthetics: At his Coachella debut in April, he went from Beastie Boys’ Sabotage to experimental Metrist techno to Taylor Swift’s You Need to Calm Down to Aphex Twin’s raspy chatter Come to Daddy, and that was just the first 10 minutes. “Coachella was amazing. I only had an hour, so I had to cram everything in.” His anti-puritan style is essentially techno music with all kinds of other sounds mixed in: “It doesn’t matter what it is: if it’s good music, it’s good,” he says.

Yukimatsu grew up on the east side of Osaka. When he was in elementary school, his father worked in the record business out of his garage. “I was very young, only seven or so, and I wasn’t really into his music. But I remember the intro guitar phrase to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, and the Stairway to Heaven arpeggio. I realized it was a good education only later, when I was about thirteen.” He was never interested in nightclubs, but he started buying music early on – first metal and rock, then Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, Boredoms and Ryuichi Sakamoto, before discovering electronic music. The underworld and the prodigy were of particular importance: “That’s what I grew up on.” In high school, he wanted to be in a band, but he didn’t start DJing until the mid-2000s. Five years later, he got his big break when techno veteran DJ Nobu invited him to perform at his “Future Terror” night in Tokyo.

On stage, Yukimatsu has a striking presence, lean and sculpted. The physique of those distinctive nude sets is due in part to his sport (he was a competitive swimmer in high school) and years spent in construction and manual labor — inspired, he said, by Yukio Mishima’s short story about the beauty of coal miners. Then came the cancer, which is now in remission. “I went for a medical examination at the beginning of the year, and there was no longer a tumor,” he says. While going through the illness, “I listened to a lot of music, and slept a lot at night. It was difficult financially. DJs don’t get paid much in Japan. A friend of mine let me work at their record store and I managed to survive somehow. But I had more time to get closer to the music and I think my level of DJing improved.”

He says he’s on the Bandcamp music market “almost every day,” tailors his sets to the country he’s playing in, and recently reviewed Italian material before some Italian dates: Adiel and Danza Tribale releases, and Spazio Disponibile releases. “I’ve also recently returned to Fatboy Slim’s Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars – it’s so good!” He’s considering making this album’s “Drop the Hate” a staple of every collection, a sentiment echoed in the “No to War” pendant he wears around his neck: normalizing pacifism in a time of relentless conflict. “Jimmy xx’s ‘Treat Each Other Right’ is also a really great tune, which is almost unbelievable, right now,” he says. “The title is something that all people in the world should engrave in their hearts.”

What keeps him going? “I want to be a better DJ and a better person. Every day I think about it. And if I start to forget it, someone always reminds me. It’s a process that keeps growing, until the day I die.”