so sumo me

Jon Dale points me towards this 1996 album by Soichi Terada as recently referenced in a FACT feature on Terada + Shinichiro Yokota as great Japanese house music geniuses:

"In the mid-90s, a massive influx of drum and bass caused house music to fall by the wayside in Tokyo. Terada was was enamored by the excitement and sub-bass pressure of jungle. “I was addicted to drum and bass [from] 1995,” he says. “It was so fun to experience the sub-bass sound in a club. I loved to go the drum and bass parties much more than the house events – in the late ‘90s I had a drum and bass disease, personally.” He went on to produce what he calls “sumo jungle”; sampling sumo fights from TV and utilizing the huffs, smacks, gongs and chants into his own strain of drum and bass, as heard on 1996’s Sumo Jungle LP."

This album is actually rather terrific, just as a mid-Nineties drum'n'bass full-length that strikes a sweet balance between dark'n'ruff and coffee-table-esque musicality - reminding me of Omni Trio at the mid-point between Deepest Cut and Haunted Science

And then the sumo soundbites - especially the ululating chants - are a really nice garnish on top.