User:Green Speeder/Masa Oka

Masa Oka (Masaki Okamoto, born 1974) is an Electronic musician who exclusively releases his works on his website (www.masaoka.info) for free. His musical style is influenced by Jazz, Fusion, Classical music and various Electronic music such as House, Techno and Drum n Bass.

Childhood / Teenage
He was born in Gobo city, Wakayama prefecture and started playing guitar at age 10 and keyboard at 14, the latter of which made him write his own music. The keyboard he was given was a Yamaha EOS B200, which also had a built-in 8-track sequencer. His earliest influences were Stock Aitken Waterman (through recordings of Kylie Minogue and Rick Astley), TM Network, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Pet Shop Boys. He attended and graduated from Hidaka high school and was a member of a Hard rock/Punk rock band called Fuckers during that period. He took classical guitar lessons from a local musician, who suggested that he apply for a nation-wide guitar competition in composition. He won the third prize in it at age 17. He also took jazz guitar lessons at a music school in Osaka. In May of 1993, a farewell concert was held in Gobo for leaving Oka, in which he performed rock classics and his own songs with guitar and vocal. About 200 people attended the concert.

1993-1994
He moved to Boston after high school to attend Berklee College of Music from 1993 to 1995 and majored in guitar performance. When he entered the school, he was behind many other students in skills and failed to obtain an "ensemble rating", a 4-digit number the school assigned its students in order to enroll them in band-ensemble classes at an appropriate level. (Each digit indicate the student's ability in respective aspects, first one being sight-reading skill, for example.) His roommate at the dorm was Jamie Coleman, a British trumpeter who performs free-improvised music around London as of 2009. Among the classes he took during this period was Harmony taught by Barbra London. In his 2nd semester, he got an ensemble rating of 2222 (averaged) out of 1111-7777 that were said to be offered by the school.

1994-1995
Hard practicing made his ensemble rating soar over time, and by the spring of 1995, it was 6666 (averaged). (The rating was decided thorough auditioning, and one of the auditions he took was examined by Tomo Fujita (website).) He started taking some top-notch ensemble classes such as Avant-Garde Ensemble led by George Garzone and Yellowjackets Ensemble for which the horn player was Takahiro Miyazaki (宮崎隆睦), the former front man for T-Square.

During this period, he befriended Mekaal Hasan, Alex Lacamoire (who was the keyboard player for his first recital, and, in turn, who had him as the guitarist for his recital), among others. He also took private lessons from Martin Koller (website), an Austrian guitarist.

Drugs
As he became more competent on his instrument and grabbed more attention from his peers than before, he also started indulging in using drugs both in private and before performance events such as friends' recitals where he made a guest appearance or ensemble auditions. The substances used included Marijuana, Cocaine and LSD which collectively harmed both his physical and mental health in the last months of the Boston period, and ultimately led him to quitting the college and moving to London to start over anew. He used the drugs partly because he was afraid if he could perform well (to meet others' and his own expectations), and because he wished to overcome the pain caused by continuous failing love.

London
He quit Berklee in the summer of 1995 and moved to London for a fresh life with his new girlfriend, where he was exposed to the local club/dance music scene. He stayed there until the summer of 1996. During this period he befriended Kumo, who gave him an old Atari machine and taught him the basics of music programming on Cubase.

Tokyo
In the summer of 1996, he returned to Japan and started living in Tokyo. Not having finished college education kept him from acquiring white-color jobs, and he was forced to work as a day laborer. He bought an Akai S3000XL sampler and a PC running a "lite" version of Cubase, and started producing his own music seriously. Having brought back many Drum n Bass records from London, he started DJing in a weekly-party Yu-boku-min (遊牧民 "Nomad") which he also organized at PSY in Shinjuku, Tokyo. His DJ alias was Maapee, a nickname one of his former girlfriend gave him during high school.

In 1998, he produced 500 copies of single-CD (a CD format popular for releasing singles in Japan around this time) containing two tracks he produced with the gears, and distributed them himself through CD shops in Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, Sendai and Fukuoka. The tracks were called 1) 死、再生、永遠 (Death, Rebirth and Eternity) and 2) 赤い惑星 (The Red Planet).

He won the third prize in Sony Music's Future Music Audition in 1999 with a track Overcome the Shyness. One of the judges for the audition happened to be an associate for an ongoing movie project Blister! and subsequently, Death, Rebirth and Eternity and The Red Planet went into the movie's soundtrack.