00. intro
01. Fine Night / Cloonee
02. Rain (Vocal Remix – Harry Romero Edit) / Kerri Chandler
03. After The Rain / Miguel Migs
04. Don’t Ya Know (Johnny Fiasco Mix) / Atnarko
05. Do Me This Way feat. Alexander East / Jay Tripwire
06. The Very Existence / Los Hermanos
07. Burnin / Pépé Bradock
08. さよなら惑星 ～かぐや姫の涙～(Edit) / Peach sugar snow
09. Hazy / Ginger does’em all
10. Cero (DJ Harvey Remix) / Galarude
11. I Wanna Dance (onionboy Remix) / カレーパイセン
12. Samba de mar / 大貫妙子
This jacket was shot right in front of Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, with 兎白えむ (Toshiro Emu) in front of the lens. She’s modeled for tracktop girl before, and she also sang vocals on “熱い水,” a track from リハビリテーション — the other name I work under, separate from tonya_harding. Her talent isn’t confined to one discipline; the same instinct that carries a vocal take carries a pose.
The “HOUSE is HOUSE” shirt she’s wearing belongs to a party run by an ally of mine in Kansai — one of the people keeping house music honest out there. Standing her in front of the city’s tallest, coldest building, wearing that shirt, felt like the right way to open this.
There’s no sea in the center of Tokyo. June was cool this year, almost surprisingly so — enough to make you think maybe this summer would be different. It wasn’t. The heat came back anyway, thick and airless, the same suffocating season Tokyo repeats every year without fail. Somewhere inside that heat I started imagining a sea that logically shouldn’t exist here — and decided the only honest response was to build one myself, out of 125 beats per minute and fifty minutes of house.
The set opens with waves that shouldn’t be there — a sample of ocean sound, deliberately flattened, stacked under a kick and hat that are just as inorganic on purpose. Right before the rhythm section locks in, I slip in a small funk fill, almost too clever for its own good, a little joke aimed at whoever’s actually listening close. Then, as track 01 comes in underneath it, I push the shimmer reverb harder and harder until the waves that sounded cold and mechanical a minute ago suddenly feel like they were gentle the whole time — you just couldn’t hear it yet. That flip, somewhere between coolness and horror, is the doorway into everything that follows.
From there the mix runs straighter and harder than what I usually put out — no genre-hopping, no 2-step detours, just one house line held at 125 the entire way.
Cloonee’s “Fine Night” opens the floor with a hook simple enough to land instantly and still carry its good mood into whatever comes next. Kerri Chandler’s “Rain,” in the Harry Romero edit, brings the humidity and pull that only Chandler seems to get right, and Miguel Migs’ “After The Rain” answers it — not the storm, but the exhale after it, keeping the temperature up without ever raising its voice. Atnarko and Jay Tripwire deepen the floor from there, Los Hermanos “The Very Existence” sneaks Detroit’s blood into a house set the way I always do — some tracks refuse to stay inside their own genre and I’ve stopped trying to discipline them — and Pépé Bradock’s “Burnin” lets the heat build from inside the groove instead of announcing itself. Later, Galarude’s “Cero,” reworked by DJ Harvey, drops the BPM down to something closer to a heartbeat and asks the room to lower its center of gravity instead of raising its hands — a reminder that the sea I’m chasing isn’t always loud.
The last stretch of this mix exists for one reason: to keep putting the people I owe something in front of you, again and again, until you can’t forget them either.
08 is “さよなら惑星 ～かぐや姫の涙～,” produced by 小林清美, an artist I’ve admired for a long time under Peach sugar snow. On paper it’s a song about despair. I still hear hope in it, and I don’t mind if that reading gets called naive. The original streaks by like a shooting star, too fast to hold onto — so I slowed it down, reworked the rhythm section by hand, and gave it enough room at 125 to carry the hope I wanted it to carry.
09 is “Hazy,” from my old friend Ginger does’em all. These days he’s put most of his energy into chasing sake instead of music, so he barely puts anything out anymore — but he’s an obvious genius, on the decks and behind the desk both. Neither of us has ever been mainstream, and I intend to keep being more stubborn about not letting him be forgotten than he is about disappearing.
11 is “I Wanna Dance,” another ally, カレーパイセン, remixed by onionboy — someone who’s looked out for both of us for years. His new record is excellent, and this particular remix simply fit the shape of this set better than anything else I could have chosen.
It closes on 大貫妙子’s “Samba de mar,” from her 1981 album AVENTURE, arranged by 清水信之 and 加藤和彦, Prophet-5 and woodwinds moving underneath her voice. Sails coming down, waves murmuring, eyes closing into the light, a world spinning through color — it’s the most literal sea in the whole set, and the most honest way I could think of to end it.
No car ride out of Tokyo actually reaches a coastline tonight. But a car stereo, a pair of headphones on the train home, a speaker in a room with the windows shut against the heat — any of them can still hand you the same coolness, and still make you move. That’s the sea I wanted to build. Not a real one. Just impossible enough to need making.
