Susumu Hirasawa

Susumu Hirasawa (平沢進) is a Japanese musician and composer.

He is well known for his work for the films of director Satoshi Kon and the animated adaptations of the Berserk manga series, alongside his work as a solo artist.

Hirasawa was born on April 2nd, 1954, to his father Kiyoshi (平沢 清), a firefighter as well as a calligrapher.

Under the penname "Hōseki" (峰石), he wrote the names of album and band for the cover art of the P-Model album Potpourri.

Hirasawa lived with his older brother, artist Yūichi (平沢 裕一), who goes by the moniker "YOU1".

He formed a stage effects team for Mandrake and appeared on the band's final show, running on a treadmill.

As an avid fan of science fiction novels since the 1970s and an eclectic reader overall, he's been inspired by the works of Frank Herbert, Carl Jung, Hayao Kawai, Kenji Miyazawa, George Orwell, Wilhelm Reich, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Theodore Sturgeon, Nikola Tesla and Kurt Vonnegut.

A constant source of inspiration for his music has come from Thailand.

He enrolled in the Tokyo Designer Gakuin College in 1972 and graduated cum laude in 1975 from the university's interior design course.

According to the Tokyo Designers' Gakuin College '75 Design Annual, his graduation project was a dome-shaped stage set hall for Tangerine Dream's performances.

In his fifth year of elementary school, Hirasawa learned to play the electric guitar, inspired by the surf and instrumental rock bands he heard on the radio and on TV, later joining his junior high school's band.

In 1973 he formed Mandrake, a progressive rock band that incorporated elements from heavy metal and krautrock together.

Being one of the few Japanese progressive rock bands of its time, Mandrake achieved little success and released no albums during its lifetime.

During the early days of Mandrake, he worked as a part-time carrier on a fruits and vegetables market during the morning and at a Pepsi warehouse during the night, alongside Mandrake co-founder Fumiyasu Abe.

In 1978, Hirasawa applied for a part-time lecturer position at Yamaha Music Foundation, and got the job, as he was the only person who applied.

After discovering punk rock and working on synthesizer-heavy projects, Hirasawa decided to change the band into the electronic rock band P-Model in 1979.

Initially met with success, they changed to the unpopular post-punk and experimental rock genres after Hirasawa went through an adverse reaction to his fame.

With Hirasawa at the forefront, the band went through various lineups and achieved some popularity in the Japanese independent music scene.

He taught courses at the Yamaha Synthesizer School until 1983, and met various musicians that he would later collaborate with through these lectures.

After leaving his position as teacher, he took to making commercial jingles for the rest of the decade to make ends meet.

In 1989, Hirasawa launched his solo career with the release of the album Water in Time and Space.

His music incorporated elements from other genres, alongside themes from philosophy and psychology.

On a 1994 trip to Phuket, Hirasawa went through a "Thai shock", amazed by the country's culture, namely its transgender cabaret performers, some of whom he would invite to be singers on his albums and guest performers in his concerts throughout his career.

After many trips back to the country Hirasawa grew to be increasingly identified with the Thai trans community, incorporating their problems and experiences in society into his work.

On having his music categorized based on western trends, Hirasawa has said:

For every main solo album he releases, Hirasawa also stages an accompanying "Interactive Live Show", an interactive concert that merges computer graphics with his music to tell a story.

Since 1998, participation has been possible through the internet.

Hirasawa's live music is built on samples he activates with various hand-crafted machines and pre-recorded tracks without vocals.

He continued to change his musical style while concurrently working with two different iterations of P-Model until the group was disbanded in 2000.

He has actively been releasing new music since.

Hirasawa's music takes from such concepts as analytical psychology, advances in digital technology, the philosophies of yin and yang, and principles of nature versus machines.

The flow of each show is determined by audience participation; for example, Interactive Live Show 2000 Philosopher's Propeller was formatted as a maze, and the audience was asked to choose which direction to go in.

Provided with phone numbers to four cellular phones during one song, the audience was allowed to call the numbers to have Hirasawa play the corresponding ringtones.

This created an improvised harmony between the background music and the ringing phones.

Yūichi was P-Model's art director for the band's first 9 years of existence, and has done occasional artwork for his brother from 2013 onwards.

His only musical credits are for writing the lyrics of "For Kids" and "Sunshine City" (from In a Model Room), and for doing backing vocals on "Rocket" (from The Ghost in Science).

Since childhood, Hirasawa had an interest in machinery, and thought of himself as an engineer.

He was an RC plane enthusiast, wanting to be a pilot, and repaired broken devices like radios and flashlights given to him by his parents.

He studied in the electronics department of Honjo Technical High School, where he was the first to finish the graduation project, the construction of a TV, despite the fact he did not fully understand the circuits.

He also had motocross as a hobby.