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TA few years ago this month, Japanese DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu suffered a seizure. When he didn’t show up to book the festivities, organizers contacted his friends in Osaka, who found him collapsed at home. He was taken to the hospital where doctors found a brain tumor. “If no one had spoken to me, I would have died,” he wrote on a fundraising platform a few months later.
In a black-and-white photo accompanied by a group of people to support his work, Yukimatsu leans into the camera, his voice growing around a large scar that stretches from his left ear to the top of his hairline: he underwent two craniotomies, a combination of chemo and radiation. The illness also left him with the realization that he had to make DJing his full-time job; dedicated to his work and making the world a better place. “If we can live tomorrow, if I can inspire people… that’s what I try to do,” he says now. “The world is worse than when techno was born (mid 1980s) Weapons are being developed; killing people is becoming easier.
When I talk to Yukimatsu on video, he is between shows in Dublin and Barcelona as part of his world tour; Later this summer he will be the main sponsor of Prodigy’s UK gigs. The 47-year-old has always been described as your favorite DJ, and a well-known set performed in November 2024 in Tokyo shows why: closing 20m views, it is one of the most popular videos on the dance platform Boiler Room. Yukimatsu who wears a shirt often acts as a fist on the back of the ship, lifting people up like a rope – then dropping them.
“That’s a good comparison!” He says. “I like very strong words and very uplifting music. I want people to feel positive from my bands; I want to bring something like lightness to what I do.” That’s not to say they don’t do anything fancy: at Coachella in April they went from Beastie Boys’ Sabotage to Metrist’s experimental techno to Taylor Swift’s You Need to Calm Down to Aphex Twin’s rasping gabber on Come to Daddy, and that was in the first 10 minutes. “Coachella was amazing. I only had an hour, so I had to fit everything in.” He says his anti-purist style is basically techno with all the other sounds mixed in: “It doesn’t matter what it is: if it’s good music, it’s good.”
Yukimatsu grew up in the east of Osaka. When he was in elementary school, his father had a history of selling his car. “I was very young, about 7 or so, and I didn’t really like his music. He wasn’t really into clubbing, but he started buying music early – first metal and rock, then Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, Boredoms and Ryuichi Sakamoto, before he discovered electronic music. Underworld and Prodigy were important: “That’s what I was raised with.” In high school he wanted to be in a band, but he started DJing in the mid-2000s. At five, he got his break big, when techno veteran DJ Nobu invited him to perform at his Future Terror night in Tokyo.
On stage, Yukimatsu cuts an impressive figure, lean and shiny. The look of these topless sets is a nod to his sport (he was a competitive swimmer in high school) and years spent in construction and manual labor – inspired, he says, by Yukio Mishima’s short story about the beauty of coal miners. And then came the cancer, now in remission. He said: “I went to the hospital for an examination at the beginning of the year, and there is no more tumor. Through the disease, “I listened to a lot of music, and I slept a lot at night. Finances were difficult. DJs are not paid much in Japan. A friend of mine let me work at their record store and I somehow managed to survive. But I had more time to approach the music and I think my DJing has improved. “
He says he’s on the Bandcamp music market “pretty much every day”, and he adjusts his system to the country he’s playing in, lately he’s been looking at Italian stuff before the Italian dates: Adiel and Danza Tribale releases, Spazio Disponibile releases. “I recently returned to Fatboy Slim’s Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars – it’s great!” He is thinking of making the album Drop the Hate popular among all groups, a sentiment that is heard in the “war pant” he wears around his neck: to maintain pacifism in a time of constant conflict. “You’ll Do Better Another by Jamie xx is also the best song and, unsurprisingly, here,” he says. This topic is something that all people in the world should write in their hearts.
What keeps him going? “I want to be a good DJ and a good person. Every day I think like that. And if I start to forget, someone will always remind me. I am constantly growing, until the day I die.”
