Japanese DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu: A Decade of Resilience and Musical Evolution

Ten years ago this month, Japanese DJ Yousuke Yukimatsu had an epileptic seizure. When he didn’t show up for a festival booking, organisers got in touch with his friends in Osaka, who found him collapsed at home. He was taken to hospital where doctors diagnosed a brain tumour. “If no one had contacted me, I might have died,” he posted on a crowdfunding platform several months later.

In the black-and-white photograph accompanying the crowdfunder to support his work, Yukimatsu leans his head towards the camera, his buzz cut growing out around a thick ragged scar that curves from his left ear to the top of his hairline: he’d been through two craniotomies, plus extensive chemo and radiation therapy. The illness also left him with a realisation that he needed to make DJing his full-time job; to dedicate himself to his craft and make the world a better place. “If we can keep living [for] tomorrow, if I can encourage people … that’s what I’m always trying to do,” he says now. “The world is getting much worse than the time when techno was born [in the mid 1980s]. Weapons are being developed; it’s getting easier to commit a massacre. In Japan, if a musician speaks about politics, they can be hugely criticised. But I think it’s really important to speak up.”

When I speak to Yukimatsu on a video call, he’s between shows in Dublin and Barcelona as part of his current world tour; later this summer he’ll be the support act for the Prodigy’s huge open air UK gigs. The 47-year-old is routinely described as your favourite DJ’s favourite DJ, and a now-legendary set he did in November 2024 in Tokyo shows why: closing in on 20m views, it is one of the most popular videos on dance livestream platform Boiler Room. At his best, the frequently shirtless Yukimatsu is like a clenched fist behind the decks, holding the crowd aloft as if by a string – then dropping them.

“That’s a good comparison!” he says. “I like very strong sounds and very emotional melodies. I want people to feel hope from my sets; I want to bring something like light into what I do.” That’s not to say he deals in generic loveliness: at his Coachella debut in April he went from Beastie Boys’ Sabotage to Metrist’s experimental techno to Taylor Swift’s You Need to Calm Down to Aphex Twin’s rasping gabber on Come to Daddy, and that was just the first 10 minutes. “Coachella was amazing. I only had an hour, so I really had to cram everything in.” He says his anti-purist style is basically techno with all manner of other sounds mixed in: “It doesn’t matter what it is: if it’s good music, it’s good.”

Yukimatsu grew up on the east side of Osaka. When he was in primary school, his father had a side hustle dealing records out of his garage. “I was very little, just seven or so, and I wasn’t really into his music. But I remember the intro guitar phrase to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, and the Stairway to Heaven arpeggio. I only realised it was a good education later on, at about 13.” He was never really into clubbing, but started buying music early on – first metal and rock, then Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth, Boredoms and Ryuichi Sakamoto, before discovering electronic music. Underworld and the Prodigy were particularly important: “That’s what I was raised on.” In high school he’d wanted to be in a band, but only started DJing in the mid-2000s. Five years in, he got his big break, when techno veteran DJ Nobu invited him to perform at his Future Terror night in Tokyo.

On stage, Yukimatsu cuts a striking presence, lean and chiselled. The physicality of those characteristically topless sets is down in part to his athleticism (he was a competitive swimmer in high school) and years spent in construction and manual labour – inspired, he’s said, by a Yukio Mishima short story about the beauty of coal miners. And then came the cancer, now in remission. “I went for a medical checkup at the beginning of the year, and there is no longer a tumour,” he says. Going through the illness, “I listened to a lot of music, and I slept a lot at night. Financially it was difficult. DJs aren’t paid very much in Japan. A friend of mine let me work at their record shop and I managed to survive somehow. But I had more time to get closer to music and I think my DJing got better.”

He says he’s on music marketplace Bandcamp “pretty much every day”, and tailors his sets to the country he’s playing in, recently checking out Italian material ahead of some Italian dates: Adiel and Danza Tribale releases, Spazio Disponibile releases. “I’ve also recently gone back to Fatboy Slim’s Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars – it’s so good!” He’s considering making that album’s Drop the Hate a staple in every set, a sentiment echoed in the “no war” pendant he wears around his neck: normalising pacifism at a time of relentless conflict. “Treat Each Other Right by Jamie xx is also really a great tune and, almost unbelievably, of now,” he says. “The title is something all the people in the world should engrave in their heart.”

What keeps him going? “I want to be a better DJ and a better human being. Every day I think that. And if I start to forget it, someone always reminds me. It’s a constant growing process, until the day I die.”