A disciple of Japanese über-producer Tetsuya Komuro and a successful musician in his own right, Daisuke Asakura came a long way from being the heir to a family plumbing business. His parents were no strangers to art, and he was given piano lessons as a kid, picking up the Yamaha synthesizer at age ten. After graduating from high school, Asakura got a job at Yamaha, and was featured in the instruction video for one of the synthesizer models; by 1987 he was spotted by Komuro and began working with his band TMN (aka TM Network), first as a technician and then as a touring musician. In addition, he participated in the recording of the Komuro-penned "OST" for the movie Ten to Chi To (1990), took part in the musical Mademoiselle Mozart (1991), and debuted with the solo album Landing Timemachine (1991). It didn't do much for him, and neither did the follow-up, D-Trick (1992), but his new project did: the band Access (or AXS), which Asakura formed in 1992 with vocalist Hiroyuki Takami, hit it big, although it only lasted until 1995, leaving behind four studio albums. Still, Asakura was on a roll, releasing three solo singles and the album Electromancer in 1995, and then conducting auditions for bandmembers to join him in the group Iceman; Asakura selected guitarist Kenichi Ito and singer Michihiro Kuroda for the group, which released five albums until 2000, when tensions between Asakura and Kuroda did the band in.nn During Iceman's run, Asakura also began his producing career, working with a bevy of J-pop acts, including Kinya Kotani, Takashi Fujii, Akiko Hinagata, Run & Gun, and even the visual kei band Shazna. His biggest success was T.M. Revolution (born Takanori Nishikawa), who had his first Asakura-penned hit in 1995 and went on to become a star with multi-million sales. Asakura even worked together with his protégé under the expanded moniker The End of Genesis T.M.R.evolution Turbo Type D (or simply TMR-e) in 1999, when Asakura also did the soundtrack for the popular anime series. However, Asakura soon parted ways with T.M.R.evolution and returned to solo recording, releasing fourth album 21st Fortune CD (2002); working with Kenichi Ito in Mad Soldiers, a comedy cover spinoff of Iceman; and re-forming Access in 2002. He also toured with TMN several more times in the mid-2000s, and in 2004-2005 he released the ambitious project Quantum Mechanics Rainbow, within which he recorded seven CDs; he then went on to produce two singles for the J-pop star Kimeru. After another touring spell with TMN and collaboration with the video game franchise Dance Dance Revolution, for which he wrote some songs, Asakura started another huge project, DA Metaverse, for which he released 100 songs in 1,000 days. ~ Alexey Eremenko