Electronic wiz Hakushi Hasegawa pulls back the curtain

Listening to “Departed,” the opening track from Hakushi Hasegawa’s new album “Mahogakko” (“Magic School”), is like riding one of those elevators that moves so fast it makes your ears pop. In the space of just over two minutes, it assails you with sugar-rush rhythms, ecstatic chipmunk vocals, big-band fanfares and a sudden detour into autotune balladry — all executed at a breathless 232 beats per minute.

“That’s the fastest tempo where I could count (the BPM) myself,” the 25-year-old says, speaking at a record label office in Tokyo’s Nakameguro neighborhood. “It’s like a physical experiment.”

There’s a similar kind of science at play throughout “Mahogakko.” Released on Brainfeeder, the label run by Steven Ellison (better known as Flying Lotus), it’s an album that pushes the limits of comprehensibility. Radiant melodies suddenly melt down into pitch-bent goo; luscious textures are paired with frenzied beats.

While Hasegawa’s early releases could sound like a synthetic jazz band that had downed a few too many espressos, the intensive sound design used throughout “Mahogakko” means that it’s often hard to describe what you’re even listening to. Hasegawa (who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns) talks about the “explanatory ratio” they use to strike a balance in their music between tunefulness and dissonance — the dazzling and the downright baffling.

“In terms of compositional technique,” they say, “the most important thing isn’t how one particular sound connects to another, but the feeling you get when that sound arrives and the difference between the two as a measure.

“To put it crudely, it’s like when there’s a beautiful chord progression for a long time and then suddenly a muddy chord comes in, or when a constant BPM abruptly changes and then switches back again. What I’m measuring is how much you can explain that change, the arrival of a certain sound, or the tone of that sound.”

This balancing act is at the heart of Hasegawa’s music. It’s undoubtedly experimental but also, once your ears get acclimatized, as addictive as the best pop. Whereas an earlier generation of electronic artists preferred to skulk behind their laptops and let the music do the talking, Hasegawa places their emotive vocals and dexterous keyboard work at the center of the action — reminding listeners that there’s a very human presence at the controls.

The question of who exactly is making the music was a recurring theme during the production of “Mahogakko.” In the Japanese press materials, Hasegawa talks about how the album initially set out to “invert the body” by upending assumptions listeners might make about the music’s creator.

“One of the really important factors for this album as a whole was the voice,” they tell me. “When we listen to music made by someone we know nothing about, we imagine the body of the person who’s singing or speaking ... how tall they are, their gender or body shape, even whether they wear glasses.”

The original idea, Hasegawa explains, was to interrogate these assumptions by evoking an imaginary body that was the complete opposite of reality. (“There was an obsessive side to the way I was thinking about my body,” they concede.) However, as they worked on the album, they realized that they’d been wrong to think about the body in such monolithic terms.

“As production work progressed, and I explored different ways of using my voice, I realized that the body can do a lot of contradictory things,” they say. “I can make my voice sound like someone completely different — or not. When I started out, I’d thought of my body as something that possessed a certain attribute so strongly, it could be inverted, but actually this wasn’t true.”

In a 2021 interview, Hasegawa cited philosopher Judith Butler as one of their biggest influences (the other was iconoclastic composer John Cage). Butler is best known for upending binary views of gender, sex and sexuality in their landmark 1990 book “Gender Trouble,” while their work has also explored the relationship between the body, identity and society at large. When I ask if this ties in with the themes Hasegawa was wrestling with during the making of “Mahogakko,” their face lights up.

“I think it’s strongly connected,” they say. “Judith Butler has really shaped half — maybe even 70% — of the way I think.”

Hasegawa is slowly adjusting to life in the public eye. Earlier this year, they released their first proper artist photo after years of preferring to keep their face obscured. However, they’re quick to note that they don’t fit the profile of the reclusive artist type.

“I like to have fun, surprise people and make them laugh,” they say. (For the record, Hasegawa also likes to go clubbing.) “If you were going to call someone like me shy, I feel like the people who are really shy might get ticked off.”

Getting released on Brainfeeder is sure to raise Hasegawa’s profile even further. The label — also home to flamboyant, exploratory artists including Thundercat and Louis Cole — feels like a natural home. But while describing it as an “honor” to be signed to the label, Hasegawa downplays the significance of getting released internationally.

“I’ve never been especially fond of those kinds of confrontations, like ‘Japan versus overseas’ or ‘mainstream versus independent,’ and I’ve never thought of myself as working within those frameworks,” they say. “I don’t think I’m an especially Japanese artist.”

Brainfeeder has released a few albums by bona fide jazzers, notably Kamasi Washington, though much of the label’s music is better described as jazz-adjacent. That’s also a good fit. Although Hasegawa often works with jazz musicians — most recently in their appearance on YouTube channel The First Take — the producer doesn’t claim to be part of the tradition.

“The compositional theory (of jazz) and so on have been a huge influence, as well as the sensibility,” they say. “It’s one of the genres of music that I love. But I’m well aware of how high the threshold is for jazz — it’s so difficult, and you can’t play it unless you’re willing to really put in the study and practice like crazy — so if I get described as ‘jazz,’ my feeling is: ‘Sorry, but no.’”

Hasegawa’s not-inconsiderable keyboard technique is a product of childhood piano lessons, a rite of passage for many Japanese youngsters.

“Neither of my parents is into music, so it was just like a form of study, like: ‘Off to piano class!’” Hasegawa recalls. When they started taking an active interest in music as a first-year junior high school student, “it must have been quite unexpected for my parents. They’d just got me to take lessons for the sake of it, and suddenly I’d turned out like this.”

As for what Hasegawa does next, maybe we can expect another stylistic U-turn, akin to when they followed up their dizzying 2019 album “Air Ni Ni” with a collection of stripped-back cover versions, including songs by Soutaiseiriron and Sakanaction, and the Disney karaoke staple “A Whole New World.”

“Temperamentally, I don’t want to do the same thing,” they say. “I always want there to be a betrayal — like, ‘Oh, this is totally different!’ I like to surprise people.”