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Beatboxing Buddhist monk Yogetsu Akasaka with his loop machine.

Beatboxing Buddhist monk creates music to relax you and lift you up

  • Yogetsu Akasaka, a Japanese Zen Buddhist, bought his first loop machine 11 years ago and began putting down beatbox tracks with layers of vocals
  • He has since added chants, and takes his art to many non-spiritual places. ‘I’m trying to make people experience something spiritual,’ he says
Music

Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Yogetsu Akasaka creates fantastically relaxing, immersive sounds and shares them online with his legions of followers.

He does it in incongruously hi-tech fashion, using his voice to record everything from droning chants to drums – he’s a beatboxer – then manipulating and looping the sounds he creates. The results are uplifting.

This is not the sort of thing monks generally do, but Akasaka, 37, is not a typical monk. Before he was ordained in 2015, he belonged to a theatre company formed in Fukushima prefecture, northeast Japan, after the region was devastated by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He has also been a full-time busker in countries including the United States and Australia.

Based in Tokyo, Akasaka played guitar as a teenager and became a beatboxer in his early 20s. He bought his first Boss Loop Station in 2009 and started combining beatboxing with layers of vocals. Since then he has added Buddhist chanting to the mix.

“After I came back from my training at the temple, I was thinking that I wanted to do music again, but I wanted to do something as a Buddhist monk as well as a musician,” he says. “I thought: maybe I can try chanting on my music.

“I was kind of afraid because this was something no one had done before – it was out of the tradition. But I just tried it, and it sounded really good to me, so I thought maybe I should do it for other people. And when I played in front of other people, they liked it.”

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He has performed in front a wide variety of people, and taken his profoundly spiritual music into non-spiritual environments such as music festivals, corporate events and conferences.

Of course, that hasn’t been possible for the past few months; Akasaki has seen a number of appearances cancelled, including a slot at giant Niconico Chokaigi festival in Japan, where he played in 2019.

Akasaka says he practises every day but, now that he has more spiritual duties to attend to, not for any predictable period of time. As he puts it: “Music is more than a pastime, but it’s not the main thing for me.”

Yogetsu Asakasa gives a performance.

It is, though, taking up more of his time since his performance of the Heart Sutra, uploaded a couple of months ago, went viral; there has been a concomitant rise in his number of online followers.

“In that video I made a big decision, because I wore a very formal robe – it’s the robe we wear when we do a funeral,” he says. “It was during a serious period for the coronavirus. The reaction really motivated me to continue with this. I’d like to do it at a funeral in the future, if people will accept this kind of thing.”

He seems delighted but slightly baffled by the level of attention he’s received and the impact his music has made.

“It was actually much more than I expected,” he says. “I was really surprised when it spread through other Asian countries, then the US and Europe; I was chanting in Japanese. Since I got so many followers, I’ve started live-streaming in English – maybe only about 20 per cent of my followers are Japanese.”

Part of the reason for the love he’s getting right now, inevitably, is the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past few months people have been going out less, and also looking for some spiritual solace.

Akasaka acknowledges that his recent spike in popularity “is related to the situation in the world. I’m sure people are really looking for more healing and less suffering. People tell me that it’s really healing. They also tell me they listen to it before they sleep, and I didn’t expect that.

“As a Buddhist, I believe people need to do meditation and experience something more than the material. What I’m actually trying to do is to make people experience something spiritual or maybe a certain state of consciousness. Live looping has the potential for that: to support the meditative state of mind and allow people get a spiritual feeling.

“Maybe as my music spreads more and more, I can help people to heal more and more. To me, if I can do that, that’s great. Ultimately I hope I can play in front of more people, but it’s already much more than I hoped for.”

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