On November 2–3, 2025, an immersive listening program titled “Deep Listening” was presented at Tsukiji Hongwanji as part of Analog Market produced by Audio-Technica.
Drifter’s CEO Taro Ishida appeared on November 3 as a featured artist.
Reframing Analog: From Nostalgia to Present Experience
The initial consultation from Audio-Technica’s producer centered on a clear question:
How can analog sound be presented not as nostalgia, but as a contemporary experience?
The shared understanding was that this could not be achieved by sound quality alone.
Space, listening posture, musical material, and the way sound is encountered all needed to be designed as a single, coherent experience.
Gagaku as the Ultimate Analog
Drifter proposed rethinking Gagaku — ancient Japanese court music — as an extreme form of analog expression.
Rather than treating it as traditional music, Gagaku was positioned as living sound, presented through state-of-the-art playback technology to be received by today’s ears.
Based on this concept, we designed both the musical structure and the mode of presentation.
The playback system for the event featured Oswalds Mill Audio’s professional concert-hall speaker system “Scottsdale” from the PROMA line — making its first appearance in Japan.
System selection, installation, and acoustic design were handled by Audio-Technica, and the musical expression was constructed specifically for this environment.
Animistic Music | Gagaku Electronics
The program, titled “Animistic Music | Gagaku Electronics,” combined live performance on traditional Gagaku instruments with electronic piano, dub-style mixing through advanced audio technology, and spoken commentary.
The aim was not to present Gagaku as heritage, but as music in the present tense — something that could be perceived viscerally by contemporary listeners.
Immediately after the performance, the creator of the speaker system came backstage to say, “It was incredible.”
That moment marked when the experiment fully arrived as shared experience.
An interview discussing the background of the performance and Ishida’s musical philosophy was later published on Audio-Technica’s official media platform, Always Listening.
Designing Experience from the Core
This project exemplifies Drifter’s approach:
not adding sound on top of an existing plan, but thinking together from the conceptual foundation — shaping sound, space, and listening into a single experience.
The process requires time and effort, but it results in outcomes that cannot be easily replicated elsewhere.
This collaboration clearly demonstrated how music, technology, and spatial design can converge into an irreplaceable form of contemporary listening.
