Daisuke Asakura

Daisuke Asakura rose from his position as successor to a family plumbing enterprise to become both a protégé of the Japanese super-producer Tetsuya Komuro and an accomplished artist in his own right. His household already embraced the arts, so he received childhood piano instruction and acquired a Yamaha synthesizer at the age of ten. Following high-school graduation he joined Yamaha’s staff and appeared in a promotional video demonstrating one of the company’s synthesizer models; in 1987 Komuro discovered him and brought him into TMN (also known as TM Network), first in a technical capacity and later as a touring performer. He further contributed to the Komuro-composed “OST” soundtrack for the 1990 film Ten to Chi To, performed in the 1991 stage production Mademoiselle Mozart, and issued his debut solo album Landing Timemachine that same year.

Neither that release nor its 1992 successor D-Trick generated significant attention, yet the band Access (alternatively AXS), which Asakura launched in 1992 alongside vocalist Hiroyuki Takami, achieved immediate commercial breakthrough; the group disbanded in 1995 after delivering four studio albums. Momentum continued for Asakura personally: he put out three solo singles plus the album Electromancer in 1995, then held auditions that led him to recruit guitarist Kenichi Ito and singer Michihiro Kuroda for the new project Iceman. The trio issued five albums before internal friction between Asakura and Kuroda dissolved the lineup in 2000.

While Iceman remained active, Asakura simultaneously launched a production career that encompassed J-pop artists such as Kinya Kotani, Takashi Fujii, Akiko Hinagata, Run & Gun, and the visual-kei group Shazna. His most prominent achievement came with T.M. Revolution (born Takanori Nishikawa), who scored an early Asakura-penned hit in 1995 and subsequently attained multi-million sales. The two also collaborated in 1999 under the expanded name The End of Genesis T.M.R.evolution Turbo Type D (or TMR-e), during which Asakura composed the soundtrack for a widely followed anime series.

Shortly afterward he severed ties with T.M.R.evolution, resumed solo work with the fourth album 21st Fortune CD (2002), joined Kenichi Ito in the comedic cover outfit Mad Soldiers—an Iceman offshoot—and revived Access in 2002. Additional mid-decade tours with TMN preceded the expansive 2004–2005 Quantum Mechanics Rainbow endeavor, which yielded seven separate CDs; he also produced two singles for J-pop performer Kimeru. Further TMN touring and song contributions to the Dance Dance Revolution video-game franchise preceded his next large-scale undertaking, DA Metaverse, for which he delivered 100 tracks across 1,000 days.