We're proud to announce a new musician joining the ranks of our team! Takahiro Izutani is a guitarist and producer hailing from Yokohama, Tokyo. Video game fans should be familiar with his contributions to games like Metal Gear Solid 4, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Bayonetta, Shinobi 3D, among others. Izutani has done a number of remixes for J-pop artists (most notably Ayumi Hamasaki), and is the guitarist and producer of Happy Family, an avant-garde rock band from Japan. By joining Brave Wave, Takahiro Izutani is looking to boost his international reputation as a multi-faceted producer, while simultaneously debuting his solo project Dugo in the shape of a new album.
"My earliest memory with music is the soundtracks of Space Battleship Yamato and Lupin the Third," reminisces Izutani. Growing up with instrumental music by the likes of Hiroshi Miyagawa and Takeo Yamashita throughout the 70s, and leading up to Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yellow Magic Orchestra, Izutani developed a strong sense of devotion to music, and especially to those without vocals. "In addition to Happy Family, I've been also working on Dugo for the past ten years, which is a personal and passionate solo-act that I'll be debuting with Brave Wave. And it's also instrumental. I think my direction with my music is derived from my adolescence roots, and I've been experimenting with such sounds ever since."
At Brave Wave, we have been fueling the passion of independent musicians for the past year — both old-school and contemporaries — and that's one of the reasons we were delighted to shake hands with Izutani and bring his immense talents on board. "The Brave Wave team loves and understands the history of Japanese game music. As a video game label that's booming in Japan yet doing work all over the world, it felt like the most fitting for me. It is also especially important that Mohammed Taher (President, Director) was interested in my Dugo project. Game music lovers are usually only looking for my work on famous video games, so Taher's genuine interest felt inviting. Our thoughts aligned and I thought we can share our future together."
Takahiro Izutani is hard at work on composing and producing Dugo's first record with creative direction by Mohammed Taher, and will be unveiled at a later date. For the mean time, you can enjoy Takahiro Izutani's work on Soundcloud, and we're giving you the chance to listen to his latest remix for AKANE ahead of the album's release date!
