Yasushi Ide – A Place In The Sun

A command across genres has distinguished Yasushi Ide’s work as a DJ and producer since emerging from the multi-scene spawning big bang that was Tokyo’s highly influential club milieu of the 1980s. His productions draw variously from hip-hop, dub, house, punk, jazz dance, exotica and electronic music - and at their most expressive, synthesize sensibilities within a single track. The respect Ide’s earned is well evident in the impressive roll call of collaborators he’s accrued over the years - Masters At Work, Tom Verlaine, Don Letts, James Chance, DJ Krush, Pharaoh Sanders, U-ROY, and Bongo Herman, just to name a legendary few.
“A Place In the Sun” is in many respects a consummate distillation of Ide’s inspirations and artistry. An exquisitely sparse down-tempo instrumental composed and produced by Ide, it features the unmistakable guitar stylings of Jamaican music giant Ernest Ranglin alongside Takayoshi Matsunaga’s steady bass, Nobuyuki Nakajima’s sparkling Fender Rhodes touches, and Yoko Ota’s tight drum programming. The track’s lovely original incarnation saw release as a Japan-only album cut from Ide’s album 2012 Late Night Blues. But in a serendipitous turn, Love Injection’s Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele encountered “A Place In the Sun” by way of an elusive 1-of-50 dubplate remix by Kaoru Inoue, aka Chari Chari (founder of the SeedsAndGround label, a subsidiary of Kenji Takimi’s respected Crue-L Records) while traveling and gigging in Japan in 2019. Barbie and Paul brought the dubplate back home to New York City, and still buzzing in the afterglow of their Japan trip, promptly fell for its perfect evocation of warmth in all its meanings, and intuitively understood: this should be more widely heard.
Now available for worldwide distribution from Love Injection Records in both digital and 7-inch 45 vinyl formats, the Yasushi Ide “A Place In the Sun (Kaoru Inoue Remix)” is paired with the equally gorgeous “A Place In the Sun (Dub).” On the former, Inoue’s treatment largely strips away the track’s beats, anchoring it to a subtle percussion pulse that emphasizes the composition’s irresistible melodic qualities. The latter finds Yoko Ota at the controls restoring and pushing reverb-soaked drums to the forefront of the mix, accentuating Ide’s affection for the sound system aesthetic while exercising just the right amount of spacial arrangement flourishes to inject some brawn amidst the beauty.
These serendipitously rediscovered renditions of a back catalog deep cut are just the latest examples of Yasushi Ide’s artistic reach. In addition to recording such acclaimed albums as 2020’s Cosmic Suite and its 2022 sequel (for which Love Injection has remixed a track), his work has spanned music supervision of some 200+ compilations for major labels, artist management, his Grand Gallery shop/gallery proprietorship, and books showcasing the depth of his archival sensibilities, including vintage t-shirt and ephemera curation. Perhaps most inspiring, however, is that Ide is still winning new appreciators and collaborators in unexpected ways four decades into a revered career that continues to evolve and expand.