Yuji Kondo

Yuji Kondo is a Japanese producer who sculpts giant and vivid constructions of dark techno under his own name as well as the Ducerey Ada Nexino alias. He is also one half of the Steven Porter project, the other member being Katsunori Sawa. Apart from being an excellent producer, Yuji Kondo also maintains 10 Label, where he expands his creative vision even further. Among the artists featured on the label compilations are such names as Dalhous, Perc or Matthew Herbert. The most recent release on 10 Label is Yuji’s own debut LP Faces Past, which presents the sophisticated conjunction between the elegance of industrial and dark ambient sounds and the physical functionality of techno. Just as the artwork by Paris photographer David Ferrua suggests, this music has both distant coldness and strange passion embedded in its core. Yuji’s sound has the feel of sustained tension that constantly balances between climax and denouement, but in some cases it has a strange sense of calmness too.

In the records

STM 222 was woven mostly of tracks taken from Yuji’s old collections from his high school and college days. The mix starts and finishes with mellow cinematic drifts from Six Organs Of Admittance and Barn Owl respectively, but the content in between is rich with lo-fi melodrama, haunted and involving field recordings that shift into musique concrète or free jazz. Even though the tracklist might seem quite intense judging by the names included, in most cases Yuji picks quite atypical examples from their discographies. Hence, we have an almost lo-fi doom metal piece by Mika Vainio, a concrete and hazy cut by Mondkopf, or Annie Anxiety at her most haunted and abstract. This entire collection seems like a fitting soundtrack for some post-modern silent film, which might conjoin the nomadic nature of Patrick Keiller’s early cinematographic experiments with the dreamy static of Chris Marker’s “La Jetée”. It could also serve as an interesting companion for urban explorations and wanderings through metropolitan fringes. At times the mix sounds like a collection of strange archival material, where society’s everyday life, struggles and surroundings are documented in sonic fragments, small musical pictures. Oskar Schlemmer’s constructivist painting “Bauhaus Stairway”, with its straight-lined patterns framing the everyday narrative, might resonate with the mix quite accurately. It mixes the cinematic flow with more rigid forms similarly to this selection.