Shugo Tokumaru

Shugo Tokumaru launched his recording career in the early 2000s with sweetly eccentric lo-fi indie-pop material that evoked the styles of Plamo, Lullatone, and PWRFL Power. In 2003 he produced the ten-track demo CD-R Fragment, which never received an official release yet caught the ear of the American imprint Music Related; that label subsequently issued his second album, Night Piece, in 2004. Additional full-lengths followed in quick succession: L.S.T. appeared in 2005, and Exit surfaced in Japan in 2007 before Almost Gold brought it to U.S. listeners the next year. On the 2010 set Port Entropy Tokumaru pursued a marginally more refined yet still playful aesthetic, and the record became his first to reach the Oricon Top 40 chart in his home country.

While assembling his third album, In Focus?, he devoted countless hours to layering hundreds of individual sounds into densely detailed collages that ultimately received mastering treatment at Abbey Road Studios; the results emerged in Japan in late 2012 and reached international markets in early 2013. The creation of Toss proved still more involved: Tokumaru enlisted an orchestra, his touring musicians, the art collective Maywa Denki, and Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier to generate raw material that he then shaped into expansive experimental pop songs. Throughout the two-year production span he chronicled every stage on YouTube and a project-specific website. Toss reached Japanese stores in October 2016 and arrived in the United States the following April.