When musicians from around the globe gathered in Tokyo last autumn for the 2014 edition of the Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) — an intensive series of lectures, gigs and studio sessions that aims to nurture promising artists — many of the participants had already found a foothold within the music industry. But Hirotaka Umetani, one of only two Japanese musicians who took part, admits that he was still "a total beginner" at the time.
The 29-year-old Tokyo resident, who produces gauzy electronica under the moniker Albino Sound, had been picked from a field of more than 6,000 candidates on the strength of just two recorded tracks, along with his passionate, detailed answers to the RBMA's notoriously dense application form. While he had some prior music-making experience, the tracks he submitted were the first he'd ever produced on a computer.
"I wasn't good with the grid," he says, referring to the basic framework used by most music production software. "That's why I'd always stuck to making guitar drones and improvised music. ... With Albino Sound, I was doing something that I thought I was really bad at — but the thing I thought I did worst ended up getting the best response."