Wata Igarashi has long been one of techno’s great shape-shifters: a headliner who thrives in strobe-lit basements, a producer who smuggles psychedelia into four-on-the-floor architecture, and a DJ whose selections feel like dispatches from some parallel dimension where rhythm is sentient. Born in Tokyo in the late ’80s but raised partially in England and Spain, he passed through skate-punk squalls and avant-jazz clatter before committing to the ascetic discipline of the decks. His earliest 12″s—sleek mutations of Detroit futurism and micro-dosed minimalism—landed on tastemaking outlets like DJ Nobu’s Bitta, Berlin’s Midgar, and New York institution the Bunker. Even then, he sounded like someone reverse-engineering techno from a dream he was only half awake for.
When he finally released his debut album, Agartha, in 2023, it arrived as a head-swivel: a Krautrock-smeared drift through misty ambient zones, cosmic lounge music, and the Moog rituals of synth mystics like Wendy Carlos and Mort Garson. It was an album of vapor trails and imagined spacecraft, the work of someone more interested in the soft edges of sound than in club-functional rigidity. His Kaleidoscopic EP earlier this year snapped things back into focus, re-centering his palette on classic techno but still humming with the afterglow of his psychedelic detours.
My Supernova, his latest, is the moment where all of Igarashi’s contradictions finally click into place. It’s a techno record that detonates in the club while unfolding just as vividly in headphones—a rare equilibrium in a genre that usually asks you to pick one. The album leans less on Agartha’s genre spelunking and more on the lessons learned from years of global touring: the way rooms breathe, the way tension travels across a crowd, the way certain kick drums feel like moral choices. “Meltzone” and “Skin” glow with the molten voltage of early Underground Resistance, all jacked 909s and industrial acid lines that expand and contract like lungfuls of cold air. “Unleashed” is even more ferocious, all saw-toothed pressure and punishing low end—a track that feels halfway between a classic Basic Channel loop and a vinyl pressing that’s just starting to warp from overuse.
The retro futurism is part of the charm. “Shockwave” and “Supernova” channel the jittery pulse of early video-game soundtracks, built from nothing more than a handful of waveforms stretched into infinity. Igarashi treats these motifs like relics from a pre-digital era—short, looping units meant to hypnotize, to erase the concept of time. Sometimes these melodic flurries risk overwhelming the propulsion beneath them, but more often they provide the album’s most vivid flashes of identity, tiny supernovas in miniature.
Still, My Supernova is not a DJ-tools grab bag. Its emotional apex arrives with tracks like “Echoes Beyond,” which grows slowly and steadily until it resembles sunrise seeping through a club’s blacked-out windows—those final, vulnerable hours when dancers can finally feel their bodies again. The album’s sequencing mirrors a thoughtful DJ set: bursts of intensity give way to soft gradients; crisp machinery softens into vapor. It recalls the history of Tokyo’s techno ecosystem—Subvoice, Sublime, Tresor releases orbiting the city like satellites—and the way its producers learned to harness brevity as a virtue rather than a constraint.
By the end, My Supernova feels less like a collection of tracks and more like a map of Igarashi’s artistic nervous system—half selector, half auteur, both halves refusing to dominate the other. It’s a reminder that techno, at its best, is a place where discipline and dream logic hold hands in the dark.
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