Kotaro Hattori's debut album remaster

The End of Dance Music, Revival + KHS-616 © 2026 Ena by Kotaro Hattori 'The End of Dance Music, Revival +’ (1st album) Release Date: 29 October 2026 “Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.” - Pina Bausch Credit Produce and Mixing: Kotaro Hattori Mastering: Stephan Mathieu (Schwebung Mastering) Cover: Rouzbeh Rashidi (Experimental Film Society) Tracklist 1. The End of Dance Music 2. Eden (Life) 3. Disconnected 4. Mezzanine 5. Metamorphosis 6. Dance (Death) 7. Epiphany 8. TEDM 9. ABEND of Dance Music 10. Goodbye Holland 11. Goodbye Holland (Ambient Version) Content Introduction (The End of Dance Music, Revival +) [T] Ryuichi Sakamoto is said to have remarked, upon completing 'async', that he “loved it so much he didn't want anyone to hear it.” This album is the equivalent for me. I originally conceived the title at the end of 2018, and the subsequent few years became a period of preparation for its production. Then, in February 2021, at the age of 21, it was released. Until then, I had kept the title a secret from everyone. Such was my attachment to it. The main production period was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. After returning from Holland, I focused seriously on production in Japan. What is being released this time is its remastered version. The order of tracks up to number 8 has been reversed, and thereafter they are in the original order. [E] Since the COVID-19 pandemic, with Trump's election victory in the US presidential election, the “echo chamber phenomenon”, including conspiracy theories, has been widely discussed. For me, the reflection of a closed worldview looping in the brain is a relatively everyday occurrence, extended into a “political context”. However, music is inherently a product of the echo chamber. Composers transcribe the sounds in their minds onto sheet music. From mediaeval church music to Bach's modern music, and in each era thereafter, it has enjoyed the spatial orientation of a place's resonance. At least, setting aside a certain snobbery that “indulges in music as intellectual cultivation over a long period”, for many listeners, such “in-group vibes” are not of interest. This is a distant cause of the temporal compression of music. Darwinism, which continues unbroken in the realm of natural science, does not exempt music from its principles. As recording technology became popular, technology took on a central role/position as the Umwelt (Uexküll) surrounding music. Stereo mixing and mastering technologies have undergone an evolution that is now untraceable. According to J. Jacobs' 'The Nature of Economies', the four elements that enable a system's survival are divergence, positive feedback, negative feedback, and emergency adaptation. The “compressed 21st century” (D. Amodio) will likely be a century where “negative feedback” garnered attention across many technological interfaces. This is evident even when considering the current state of affairs surrounding AI. [D] So how can we once again shift music and technology towards positive feedback? This can be rephrased as “the vista of the estuary (Agamben, 'At the Estuary')” after passing through the bottleneck. Technology does not “retrogress”. Technology has no regrets. Only humans regret. The sea has already arrived. Is it not just a matter of boarding the ship? Let us transcend the “self” and set sail into the vast ocean, with a nautical chart in hand, towards the sparkling night sea reflecting the stars. The “beginning” of the world is just around the corner. I want to express this departure through music. Positivism mediated by music. [M] When producing this album, my greatest consideration was the “sound image”. My interest in the spatial arrangement of sound, generally referred to as “sound localisation”, was particularly strong around the age of 20. I arbitrarily expanded on Cézanne's remark to “see nature in terms of cylinders, cones, and spheres”, and studied it under the name “Cézanne's heteronomy”. The general “position” where sound elements resonate is allocated from low to high frequencies according to their respective frequency bands, but if you listen carefully, through panning and compression, that is, through the manipulation of overtones, a huge acoustic space