Kaito

Kaito serves as the primary moniker for Hiroshi Watanabe, who earned his degree from Berklee College of Music and records under additional names including King Street, Nite System, Oxygen Music Works, Quadra, Tread, and 32 Project. The Japanese producer and DJ performed regularly at Twilo, Tunnel & Speed in New York, and maintained a residency at Save the Robots. Working under the Kaito name, Watanabe created material that Cologne’s Kompakt label characterized as nu-trance by merging early-’90s trance components with the approach of a deep house producer. He released three Kaito 12" singles across 2001 and 2002 before issuing the September 2002 full-length Special Life, which gathered those singles and incorporated extra tracks. Four months afterward came the ambient counterpart Special Love. The follow-up studio album Hundred Million Light Years appeared in March 2006, succeeded six months later by its beat-less counterpart Hundred Million Love Years. After assembling a Japan-only mix titled A Moment for the Life, Watanabe delivered Trust in September 2009 and Trust Less the following April. Four years elapsed before Kompakt put out the fourth Kaito album, Until the End of Time, in October 2013.