Mike Sunda is a music writer focusing primarily on electronic music and the Tokyo club scene. He graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England with a degree in Japanese and has been contributing to The Japan Times since 2010.
For Mike Sunda's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
While Halloween has been around in Japan for a few decades it wasn't until recently that it became a true phenomenon, especially at Tokyo's iconic Shibuya crossing.
As Mutek gears up for its third edition in Japan, the festival, which originated in Montreal and now runs in regular installments around the world, looks set to deliver its most robust offering in Tokyo to date. Seeking to celebrate both digital creativity and electronic ...
In 2017, algorithms are everywhere. They determine the news we see, the music we stream, the advertisements we're served and the very means through which we communicate and access information on a daily basis. And it's not just our online experience that's underpinned by algorithms. E-commerce ...
Last month, I was invited to speak at the inaugural Tokyo Dance Music Event — a conference consisting of workshops and talks, loosely modeled on long-running international equivalents like the Amsterdam Dance Event. On the first morning of the two-day program, I was asked to ...
The earth underneath Tokyo is trembling. This time, however, the activity is not seismic; it is not one of the many tremors that intermittently punctuate daily life in this city. It is, rather, a constant trembling: a condition of the global ecological crisis in ...
No longer the territory of purists and DJs alone, records have once again started to be recognized as a perfectly legitimate medium through which to collect and consume music. Of course, as soon as global fashion brands like Urban Outfitters and supermarket chains such as ...
Before we turn the page on the year, here's a selection of our reviewers' favorite books.
Good things come to those who wait. For 50-year-old producer Soichi Terada it's a wait that has lasted more than 20 years, but now he's one of the most in-demand artists in the house music scene, and has just returned from a tour of ...
Even within Britain, grime has long been considered a niche genre. Pioneered by east London artist Wiley in the early 2000s, whose dark, stripped-down 140-beats-per-minute rhythms drew on U.K. garage and two-step influences and updated them, the sound then evolved on the rooftops of ...
Whether it's the anthropomorphic cyborg cat Doraemon, Sony's artificially intelligent canine pet Aibo or even baby harp seals created to assist dementia patients, robots have long been recognized in Japan as capable of providing therapeutic and emotional assistance for their human owners. Director Koji Fukada's ...
