Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2011

Less is more. Or is it more is less (boring)? In one of the most inspiring late-night sets at this year’s Fuji Rock Festival, British producer SBTRKT showed why his soulful take on dubstep is both less and more than your standard electronica knob-twister’s.

Whipping up a storm behind a drum kit while his singer Sampha emoted at the mic, SBTRKT offered a far more dynamic performance than your typical arms-in-the-air DJ. At the same time, his music has a spare simplicity that has connected with listeners across the planet and propelled no less than three tracks from his self-titled debut album into the J-Wave top 100.

“We take the electronic elements from DJ culture and the fact that the songs blend, and we build an atmosphere through the set. Like DJ culture we take people on a kind of trip,” said the famously masked producer before his set. “But we use live instruments. So it’s kind of a step beyond mere electronic button pressing with maybe someone dancing on stage.”

At the same time, SBTRKT takes care not to burden his productions with the limitless palette of sounds available to the contemporary producer. “For me, the idea of this record was to strip it down,” he explains. “The worst thing about electronic music is you can overproduce quite quickly, then you’ve got a very cluttered thing. Stripping things down so you’ve got three or four sounds makes for a much clearer vision. A lot of dance music is overblown. And I just think: What does it come down to? Where is the emotive quality?”

SBTRKT (Aaron Jerome) has been a fixture of the London club scene for the better part of the last decade. But it wasn’t until he hit on the right mix of dubstep, UK garage and R&B that he blew up. The track “Wildfire” has been viewed over 700,000 times on YouTube while a remix by Canadian rapper Drake is pushing a million.

Was “less-is-more” also the intended meaning of his stage name? “Actually the main reason was about not having to talk about my records, not having to describe them as such,” he confesses. “I feel if the music is strong enough, it doesn’t need a back story about where you were born, what you eat for dinner, why all these influences are in your music. Music is very much an imaginary world, and subtracting myself from that and creating this artistic identity is what the name stems from.”

Less than two months after Fuji Rock, SBTRKT is back for a string of dates with sampling wunderkind Matthew Herbert and vaunted DJ Gilles Peterson. At the latter’s Worldwide Showcase event, he’ll be the special guest alongside Japanese club jazz collective Soil & Pimp Sessions and tap dance phenom Kazunori Kumagai. Not too shabby for a man who only just made his Japan debut.

“There’s been a really positive reaction to the record,” he says. “It’s great to see the worldwide reactions to something that stems from a very UK-centric sound. Maybe it has universal appeal because it’s more than just something made for people from South London. Japanese people seem to respond to the emotive quality of the music. All the interviewers here have said it seems like there’s a depth to the songs, whereas in other countries they talk about the production.”

A fan of Japanese music acts like Mondo Grosso and Hajime Yoshizawa, SBTRKT admits that there might be something more to the way his album has struck a chord in Japan at this particular moment.

“Maybe people are looking for something cathartic right now,” he offers. “I’d hate to put myself on a pedestal and say I’m part of this healing process but to me music works best on that level, when people reinterpret it to their own feelings, their own lives. For me it’s not about having to know all the history and sound behind the scene, it’s about appreciating the music for what it is.”

Worldwide Showcase@Liquidroom, Sep 23; House of Liquid@Liquidroom, Sep 24 (listing).