Good things come to those who wait. For 50-year-old producer Soichi Terada it's a wait that has lasted more than 20 years, but now he's one of the most in-demand artists in the house music scene, and has just returned from a tour of Europe that saw him perform in front of capacity crowds in some of the continent's most iconic clubs, including Panorama Bar in Berlin and Concrete in Paris.
Wide-eyed and constantly sporting a beaming smile, it's tempting to read into Terada a sense of child-like wonder at his sudden turn of fortune. It hardly helps when Hunee, the Amsterdam-based DJ who accompanied him on his recent tour, posted a photo on social media of Terada in France tucking into his "first ever croissant." Terada explains to me with a laugh that it was far from his first French pastry — he'd just misunderstood his traveling partner's pronunciation and didn't want to correct him. It turns out that Terada is always that buoyant, and the reality of his music career — just like the pronunciation of croissant — is a lot more nuanced.
As far as Terada's house music career is concerned, the turning point came in March, when the Dutch imprint Rush Hour released a retrospective of tracks from Terada's own label, Far East Recording. Terada formed the imprint in 1989, a few years after graduating from Tokyo's University of Electro-Communications, and the compilation — "Sounds From The Far East," curated by the aforementioned Hunee — drew together a selection of tracks by Terada (as well as long-time affiliate Shinichiro Yokota) that had originally been released between 1991 and 1993.