m-flo: The Architects of Modern Cool

The story of Japan’s most influential stray frequencies. Today, the trio's shrapnel is still lodged in the foundation of Japanese fashion and pop.

Late-90’s Japanese pop operated like a very clean filing cabinet with a cash register bolted onto its side—hip-hop over here, R&B over there, dance music down the hall, and anything English in the export tray.

Singers stepped into the limelight as producers remained in the shadows, while A&R treated the labels on each drawer like immutable truths.

Then m-flo arrived and kicked over the cabinet.

DISCLAIMER:

• This article constitutes opinion, cultural commentary, and criticism.

• Japanese translations are unofficial and non-authoritative.

“mediarite flow”

Winter 1998. Taku Takahashi is cutting a cover of Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were” at Avex’s indie imprint Rhythm Republic, for DJ Masaji Asakawa, who’s commissioned the rework. The track needs a rap verse; the regular rapper isn’t around, so Taku phones the friend he’d drummed behind since high school—Ryu Young-gi, 23, going by VERBAL, home on winter break from Boston, studying to be a Protestant minister. VERBAL comes into the booth, lays down one verse, then flies back home as winter break ends.

Asakawa, in BANZAI 2018, described hearing the result back—

「VERBALのラップが入っていて『このラップかっこいい！』って興奮した」

VERBAL’s rap was on it, and I got hyped—“this rap is sick.”

VERBAL told WWDJAPAN he didn’t think it would last—

「デビュー当時は絶対続かないと思っていました。音楽で食べていくのは無理だとずっと言われていましたから」

At the time of our debut I was certain it wouldn’t last. We had been told over and over that you couldn’t make a living from music.

The band that grew out of that session now boasts 10 original albums between them, a Guinness record, and a streetwear house—AMBUSH, run by VERBAL and his wife Yoon.

Outside Japan, m-flo is labelled as a Tokyo hip-hop-and-electronic trio with one big 2001 single the rhythm-game kids keep hitting. Between 1998 and 2010 they sold bilingual pop at platinum volume, booked Korean lead vocals on major-label Japanese singles years before the second K-pop wave saturated the Japanese chart with KARA and Girls’ Generation, relaunched as a production duo when their singer walked, and ran the loves cycle (“m-flo loves <>”) across three studio albums. Taku built block.fm after the Tokyo commercial broadcasters passed on dance music.

The parts that held together were the producer-auteur setup the Korean producer-led houses that built out K-pop a decade later, YG and Big Hit and ADOR among them, would be running on a far bigger scale.

The Japanese pop industry in 1999 worked off an A&R playbook built in the 70’s and retrofitted through the 80’s idol boom. Labels produced singers off a fixed template—house arrangers and lyricists, the positioning fixed in advance. Hip-hop in Japan in 1999 was the Shibuya club scene of Scha Dara Parr and Rhymester, neither of which had crossed onto the Oricon—the Japanese Billboard.

Material that didn’t fit the bill got filed by the A&R desks under the closest adjacent category—rap under hip-hop, dance under club, returnees to export—and booked to in-house arrangers from the same short list either way you sliced it.

VERBAL told WWDJAPAN the trio shares one thing—

「3人とも性格も歩んできた道もバラバラだけど、一つ共通しているのは『世の中に順応できない』『迎合できない』ところかもしれません」

All three of us—our personalities, the paths we’ve walked—are completely scattered, but the one thing we share, perhaps, is that we “can’t conform to the world,” “can’t pander to it.”

They signed to Avex’s Rhythm Zone sublabel and managed through LDH from the 2010s, with the producer choice, the vocal casting, and the billing held by VERBAL, Taku, and LISA, with no A&R desk in sight.

帰国子女

Taku Takahashi and VERBAL met in Tokyo as teenagers, played in a Tokyo high-school band called N.M.D., covered Public Enemy and Anthrax’s “Bring the Noise.” N.M.D. won Fuji TV’s House Energy talent show in 1992 and were offered a For Life Music deal; VERBAL turned it down because his parents wouldn’t endorse a music career.

Taku grew up in Yokohama, in a household that put him into school abroad early. Ryu Young-gi came up third-generation Zainichi Korean in a family whose pachinko-and-arcade money had bought upward mobility.

After graduation Taku moved to LA. VERBAL did Boston College for philosophy and marketing, met a Korean-American design student named Yoon Ahn, and enrolled at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His 2002 autobiography alien alter egos—published by Inochi-no-Kotoba-sha, Japan’s main Protestant publisher—confirmed Gordon-Conwell overlapped with the early m-flo years. He’d first heard rap at a YMCA summer camp in Boston around age 10.

In Tokyo on breaks, before m-flo existed, VERBAL worked with Nujabes through Guinness Records, the Shibuya shop Nujabes ran. He recorded as L-Universe—on “Ain’t No Mystery,” the first 12-inch Nujabes ever pressed under his Hyde-Out imprint, and later on “Lose My Religion” and “Lyrical Terrorists” with Substantial on Hydeout Productions’ 2003 compilation.

More on Nujabes and VERBAL’s work together in my 2019 piece:

Neither Taku nor VERBAL had conservatory training, and their verses on the early m-flo records move between Japanese and English line by line, sometimes word by word, without flagging the switch. A lot of 90’s Japanese rap switched languages between whole lines as appeal: an English line, then a Japanese line, with the English coming through the mix in the faintly over-articulated diction of an adult who’d learned the language in school. m-flo’s verses switch mid-phrase, sometimes mid-word. On Expo Expo’s back half a LISA line can pivot in a single breath—Japanese into English into a Spanish vowel. Then it lands back on a Japanese adverb whose middle English syllable falls on the downbeat.

The industry category at the time was returnee—帰国子女—a label that had existed since the oil-shock years and carried a slight stigma through the 80’s: the kid who’d lived overseas during a parent’s posting came back with English that was too good and Japanese that was visibly rusted, akin to gyopo in Korea. By the late 90’s the stigma had begun to flip in Tokyo’s international-school corridor, but the industry still treated returnee bilingualism as a novelty act: you either sang in English for the export market or in Japanese for the domestic one.

LISA

Narita Elizabeth Sakura, LISA, grew up in Setagaya between three languages and met Taku and VERBAL through inter-school choir. LISA told Mimi Man—

「うちのお母さんは、この子はアメリカンスクールに入れないとやられる！みたいなのがあったみたいで。学校内のイジメはなかったんだけど、一歩外に出るとやっぱりそういうのがすごいありました」

My mother seemed to feel something like, “I have to put this child in the American school or she’ll get beaten up!” Inside the school there was no bullying, but the moment you stepped one foot outside, that kind of thing—it really was constant.

In a 2018 Real Sound profile she described being bullied for her mixed heritage, including classmates shoving her head into a bucket of crushed chili peppers.

Her first single came out as “LiSA” on Tokuma Japan in 1993. The five years that followed ran her across more than 10 label and management setups (stints as Chica Colombiana, then as UNIKA inside Hirofumi Asamoto’s 1997 Ram Jam World relaunch), before Taku and VERBAL brought her in on the follow-up to the Streisand cover, a track called “Been So Long” that became the first release under the m-flo name. The Ram Jam World stint was the Warner-era DNB pivot LISA later credited for the spatial sensibility she carried into m-flo—something that many praise the group for.

“Been So Long” went through Avex’s indie sub-imprint Rhythm Republic and barely moved until a J-WAVE recommend pushed it.

Japanese major-label A&R departments had run this same pairing since the early-70’s kayōkyoku era and kept it going through the idol booms of the 80’s, the Komuro-family-of-acts boom of the mid-90’s, then finally Ayumi Hamasaki’s late-90’s reinvention under Max Matsuura at Avex. Contracts were shaped around this wholly—royalty splits tilted toward the production house, with visual and audio direction vested in the label; the final sign-off on image and single selection sat with people the singer never met (not so different from many 360 deals we see today). Singers who wanted creative control had to leave the major labels and build an independent career, which in Japan through the 90’s meant forfeiting the TV exposure that was still where platinum certifications came from, which was near impossible.

The tripod VERBAL and Taku offered her rested on equal billing on the artwork, leads rotating across the singles, and songwriter credits on the early records listing all three on material where Taku produced and VERBAL and LISA wrote their own verses and lines. By the time she left in 2002 she’d recorded a gold and a platinum album.

Asked by the Japan Times in 2009 where the name came from, VERBAL said it was like a meteorite flow, spelled mediarite, because they thought they’d hit the media with a big impact and surprise the unsuspecting masses with some good music. Mediarite-Flow fused 隕石 meteorite, メディア media, and rap flow into one word; the band briefly used Meteorite Flow before settling on the softer fusion, the harder version judged アクセント高すぎ too sharp on the ear. The label trimmed it to m-flo, though English coverage still reports the m as multi.

How You Scare a Japanese Label in 1999

Max Matsuura, the Avex executive behind Namie Amuro and Ayumi Hamasaki, launched Rhythm Zone in July 1999 for more abstract material and put m-flo on the sublabel as its inaugural artist. The major debut, “the tripod e.p.,” dropped the same month, then went on to track into the Oricon top 10.

Planet Shining followed in 2000 and went RIAJ gold on drum-and-bass, jazz, R&B, and bilingual rap the domestic chart hadn’t been selling.

On “Ten Below Blazing,” LISA opens her verse on a fast bilingual rap and resolves it inside the same verse, treating the rap-into-singing transition as a vocal-arrangement choice; Taku’s production under her runs chopped drum patterns and short sample flurries where safer late-90’s TV-pop would have parked a pad under the vocal.

A year after, Expo Expo moved 557,000 copies, a figure few hip-hop or electronic acts on the Japanese chart had reached. Taku’s production on the back half locks into the sound he’d keep using for the next decade.

Komuro Tetsuya—royalty amongst Japan’s superproducers—had run equal billing for all three members on Globe—a crowd favorite dance-pop hybrid group—since 1995 on his own Avex sublabel, but Globe’s version sat Komuro on the record as producer-vocalist with Keiko Yamada and Marc Panther on vocals around him. Komuro had been a chart-dominant producer for half a decade before Globe formed. Taku sat third on the same, with no equivalent background.

The Japanese single sleeve in 1999 put the singer in the front third of the art, credited the producer inside the booklet if at all, and kept the band name attached to a lead the label would replace if the lead left; Avex had templated this for Ayumi Hamasaki for over a year. m-flo ran against all of this, by design.

Hooks You Could Hum

Pizzicato Five, Cornelius, Fantastic Plastic Machine, Cibo Matto, Kahimi Karie, and Flipper’s Guitar—the Shibuya-kei generation that came up walking the Shibuya record shops in the late 80’s and early 90’s—had spent a decade teaching Japanese listeners to hear French pop, bossa nova, soul, easy listening, and hip-hop as possibilities.

Ryo Miyauchi—the GOAT behind This Side of Japan—places m-flo at the tail of the first-wave rap generation that gathered at the July 1996 Sanpin Camp—Rhymester, King Giddra, Shakkazombie—emcees working out how Japanese syllables fit 90-BPM American boom-bap. m-flo pulled cross-genre alongside that scene the way Shibuya-kei had earlier.

Shibuya in 1999 was dense with record stores, each shop organized by microclimate. The Shibuya-kei generation catered its records to the music head more than the casual listener: instrumentally dense but vocally minimal, often sung in English or French by guest vocalists whose profile was an index card of references the core listener would already know.

As a result, the records drew devoted critical coverage and international licensing deals with Matador and Bungalow, but mostly stayed with the curious HMV listener and rarely reached the mass listener who heard music through TV tie-ins and the shelf at a suburban Tsutaya. Pizzicato Five’s foreign audience was larger than their Japanese one. Cornelius’s critical standing outran his unit sales, and Fantastic Plastic Machine scored TV commercials but not Oricon top 10s.

The movement’s best-known acts sold a fraction of what m-flo would move inside Japan. The reach gap m-flo closed was specific—choruses written for ringtone audition, intros under 15 seconds. The hooks had to survive the in-store HMV listening station. They wrote vocal hooks so a listener with no reference library would still have something to hold, with a lead singer up front to carry them. Taku’s sample-and-loop backbone stayed.

VERBAL mentioned to Monocle the intentional carving of m-flo’s reign:

In the late nineties in Japan, hip-hop was hip-hop, R&B was R&B, and rock was rock. You couldn’t leave your territory. We weren’t abiding by any of those rules. We didn’t even know that there were rules.

One Plastic Button at a Time

“Come Again”—a track that would later become an all-timer—shipped in January 2001, peaked at Oricon #4, and sold around 390,000 copies. The arcades throughout Japan kept it current for the next 25 years.

Konami’s Reflec Beat chart-listed it first—a 130-BPM cut sitting at the rhythm cabinet’s playability sweet spot—then jubeat copious, then Sega’s Maimai, and suddenly, it was an arcade classic.

On May 28, 2025, m-flo released 127 versions and remixes of “Come Again” as simultaneous digital singles, Japanese and international producers drawn from a SURF Music contest, each a new read on the 2001 master. Guinness World Records certified the count that summer.

Much of mid-2000’s J-pop shipped a vocal-loudness-forward mix calibrated for TV compression and car sound system playback. Taku rejected that, and instead mixed to the spec he’d been chasing in the L.A. club 12-inch scene since 1995.

m-flo loves

LISA left m-flo in April 2002, at the band’s commercial peak. She gave the candid version on Nippon TV’s Downtown DX 16 years later: the schedule had gotten punishing, and the working relationships had broken down. When she told them she was quitting, neither of them tried to stop her.

VERBAL later described the split to the Japan Times as “Guns N’ Roses minus Axl Rose.” Taku told Arama Japan in 2019 that with LISA it was 100% or zero, so there was no way to stop her.

In Virginia, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo had been booking Jay-Z, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Kelis, and Clipse across 2001 and 2002, putting singles out under The Neptunes’ own production name with whoever they were working with that month billed as featured vocalist; their sound came from the drums, the chord voicings, and the percussive vocal stabs.

June 2003: VERBAL and Taku relaunched the band as a production-and-feature project, naming The Neptunes to the Japan Times as the reference. No permanent replacement for LISA; every single would credit “m-flo loves [Guest].”

The first two came out together: “REEEWIND!” (m-flo loves Crystal Kay) and “I LIKE IT” (Crystal Kay loves m-flo), both Oricon top 10s.

The second gave Crystal Kay her biggest hit to that point. VERBAL had already guest-rapped on Crystal Kay’s 2001 single “Ex-Boyfriend”—her first-ever featuring credit, two years before either side rebuilt the credit line into the spine of a release run. Japanese feature credits usually billed host-over-guest, with asymmetric royalty splits; loves shipped every single with a mirror-billed twin, both names equal on the artwork.

The series lasted three years: Melody. and Ryohei Yamamoto in the fall of 2003, BoA on “the Love Bug” the following spring, Astromantic platinum inside weeks of its 2004 release. It was an unprecedented run.

They put out two major singles a quarter, almost every one a top-10—a cadence the Japanese chart didn’t otherwise produce from a duo-turned-feature-shop at the time.

Emi Hinouchi, YOSHIKA, EMYLI, Ryohei Yamamoto, and LISA—the duo later branded their regulars the “Global Astro Alliance.” YOSHIKA’s “let go” was the largest non-LISA single in the run.

Akiko Wada—a Japanese R&B legend—was 55 on “Loop In My Heart / HEY!” in July 2005, 33 years past her last Oricon top-10 single, and re-entered the chart with help from Taku production, the same lift Namie Amuro got on “Luvotomy.” Wada was on the far side of the career arc where Japanese A&R let veterans drift into TV-guest territory. She was terrifying on TV and arrived in the studio asking if she’d sung it right.

The “HEY!” side was built on samples pulled from her own back catalog, and she’d forgotten her own song until m-flo played it during the sample selection. Taku, on air at J-WAVE’s TOKIO HOT100 that July: “Not knowing Wada is like not knowing Michael Jackson.” Wada entered a late-career renaissance that the Japanese TV-music circuit would cite for a decade.

Taku and VERBAL were using the credit line “m-flo loves” the way labels once used scouts. Ryuichi Sakamoto guested on “I WANNA BE DOWN,” a name the Oricon chart rarely reached, and the B-side of the let go single was a drum-and-bass cover of Sakamoto’s “The Other Side of Love,” EMYLI going by Sister E—homage to Sakamoto’s original Sister M.

Cosmicolor in 2007 included love in every vocal track’s title or subtitle. The compilation Award SuperNova: Loves Best the following winter opened at Oricon #1 and put LISA back in the booth on “Love Comes and Goes.”

Across three studio albums the cycle drew in 41 collaborators and took the group to its first Oricon #1 on Beat Space Nine, closing with a LISA cameo on “Tripod Baby”—her first post-departure m-flo collaboration, placed as the album’s penultimate track in 2005, three years post-split.

As domestic music sales contracted post-2000, the majors stopped carrying it: a singer signed with a pre-packaged act concept defined by marketing, producers assigned from a short house list, the first single out in under six months. Cross-genre pairings and unusual vocal castings fell out of budget.

LDH’s in-house biography credits m-flo with introducing the “featuring” concept to Japanese pop, which sounds great, but is unfortunately house copy: Dragon Ash’s 1999 “Grateful Days” with Zeebra and ACO and Komuro Tetsuya’s 90’s-era featuring credits both predate it. m-flo did however, build mirror-billed featuring into an existing major label structure.

Before Hallyu Built the Highway

Before the Korea-Japan pop corridor turned into an industry, it worked through personal relationships between the two scenes, and m-flo had been cutting records into that space from the start.

“the Love Bug” with BoA, 17 at the time, arrived in March 2004. SM Entertainment had installed her in Japan two years earlier through an Avex partnership: Japanese singing lessons, Japanese producers, and a 2002 Japanese-language album, Listen to My Heart, that had become the first Oricon #1 album by a Korean solo artist.

VERBAL rapped in Korean on Jinusean’s “Follow Me” and had guested on S.E.S’s Japanese single “T.O.P. (Twinkling of Paradise)” back in 1999; Wheesung appeared on an m-flo production, and Alex of Clazziquai landed on “Love Me After 12AM.” 2NE1 anchored the 2012 lead single “She’s So (Outta Control)”—a Seoul girl group featured on a Japanese pop record—and VERBAL wrote the Japanese lyrics for BIGBANG’s “FANTASTIC BABY” on the YGEX album ALIVE the same year.

Yang Hyun-suk, the Seo Taiji and Boys member who went on to found YG Entertainment, had played Stony Skunk’s music for VERBAL during a Japan trip in 2005, two years before the BIGBANG/2NE1 era; Star News Korea reported VERBAL then requested 30 copies for personal distribution and played them on his Tokyo FM Global Astro Radio weekly show.

VERBAL told Nocut News the Wheesung booking traced back to Jinusean’s Sean—

“휘성은 지누션의 션 결혼식에서 알게됐다.”

I got to know Wheesung at Jinusean Sean’s wedding.

Seo Taiji’s “난 알아요” was the first Korean record VERBAL had heard in the U.S.; working with Wheesung he wanted to quote a song Koreans would already know, so he sampled “Nan Arayo” into “I’M DA 1.”

Prime Minister Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni war shrine spanned 2001 to 2006, the comfort-women negotiations sat parallel to the entire 10-year arc, the Takeshima/Dokdo dispute flared recurrently that decade, and Korean mainstream media coverage of Japanese acts oscillated between warmth during hanryu peaks and embargo during diplomatic troughs. The Jinusean verse landed at a moment when a Tokyo rapper on a Korean release without a Korean stage name was outside the standard booking template, and the Clazziquai placement in 2007 paired a Toronto-born Korean vocalist whose Seoul group played acoustic-electronic material with a Tokyo production duo. When 2NE1 was featured on the 2012 single, Korean girl-group Japan-market saturation was at its absolute peak.

More on K-pop during that [2012-ish] era:

Friends had been sending VERBAL YouTube links of two Korean rappers in sunglasses whose act looked like m-flo’s; the duo turned out to be Mighty Mouse. VERBAL told GQ Korea what he thought of that—

“모방은 존중의 일종이니까.”

Because imitation is a form of respect.

The industrialized K-J corridor of the 2010s worked through SM-Avex, YG-Avex, DSP-Universal, and Sony-SM distro deals, including headliner groups like TVXQ, KARA, Girls’ Generation, BIGBANG, and more. m-flo had been booking Korean vocalists artist-to-artist since the mid-2000’s, half a decade before that wave, and the bookings were still coming in 2025, when Zico, a headlining Korean solo act, fronted a new m-flo single.

A Business Built on Looking Away

The Zainichi Korean population in Japan formed mainly through the 1910 to 1945 colonial period, with a postwar wave of arrivals folding into the same diaspora. Then the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty stripped the colonial-period cohort of Japanese nationality. Hundreds of thousands of people born and raised in Japan became foreign nationals. The special-permanent-resident category that followed produced a legally stable but second-class status, with documented housing and employment discrimination, while the same discrimination reached the postwar arrivals.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Japanese entertainment industry preferred Zainichi performers who took a Japanese stage name and kept the background quiet. Naming it publicly cost endorsement deals, TV access/exposure, and occasionally political neutrality. It was all about optics, something that would end up shaping J-pop over time.

VERBAL declined this; Quick Japan ran the interview in June 1999, weeks before m-flo’s major-label debut: VERBAL named as 在日韓国人, LISA as Colombian-Japanese, Taku as Japanese, all three speaking on discrimination and identity inside one feature. The Korean side caught it earlier: Sisa Journal #832 in 2005 named VERBAL alongside Towa Tei (鄭東和) and Crystal Kay as the three Zainichi-Korean entertainers in Japan who had publicly disclosed Korean ethnicity early, a framing the Japanese press of the same period largely sidestepped.

To Eastern Standard Times he gave the version he repeats in most interviews. Pachinko, the family business his grandfather had started after the war, was the archetypal Zainichi line of work: legal and lucrative, but socially shadowed. In kindergarten, kids in the neighborhood threw rocks at him and told him to go back to Korea. His mother came out with a frying pan and chased them off.

In industries whose revenue floors didn’t sit on endorsement contracts, the postwar optics convention was loosening by the late 90’s. The enforcement had been informal: agencies declined heritage-forward pitches, and labels refused promotional material that named the heritage. TV producers routed around the question during broadcast appearances.

Literature loosened first, with a longer editorial ramp and fewer endorsement dollars on the line. Yū Miri took the Akutagawa Prize in 1997, Gen Getsu in 2000, both without protective framing from the Japanese literary press. Sai Yoichi’s Blood and Bones and All Under the Moon carried Zainichi life without flinching, and Kazuki Kaneshiro’s GO, filmed in 2001 by Isao Yukisada, put the stage-name trade-off on screen—the protagonist’s father makes his son take the school examination under his Korean name.

Pop music lagged: its mass audience by the late 90’s was the same cohort the industry was still routing Zainichi performers around. To Monocle in 2026 he called himself a cultural translator—not too far from long-time friend Pharrell’s positioning. To 10 Magazine he put it as alien everywhere: Korean born in Japan, schooled in the States.

Pop music carried the endorsement floor the other industries didn’t. TV tie-ins, drama theme songs, beverage and cosmetics campaigns, and department-store promotional deals kept the revenue line, and those principals avoided artists who came with controversy. VERBAL kept his Korean name through all of it, and the endorsement deals kept renewing.

Rejected by Radio, Taku Builds the Station

m-flo had hosted their own J-WAVE show SWELTER SHELTER from April 2000 to September 2001; late in the decade Taku pitched several Japanese radio stations on an electronic-dance-music program, and the stations declined—the economy was tight, the show realistically wouldn’t find sponsors.

Taku had launched Tachytelic Records in 2002 as a Rhythm Zone imprint; its Daikanyama AIR residency booked Calvin Harris’s first major Japan DJ slot in September 2009. block.fm launched November 11, 2011, Japan’s first internet radio station dedicated to dance music.

Commercial rotation radio in Japan sold its airtime to mass-market advertisers through the national ad-buying desks, and a dedicated EDM show reached no relevant listeners. block.fm instead sold sponsorships directly—sneakers, streetwear, clubwear, and beverage companies aimed at the club demo. Taku later told Rolling Stone Japan the station had been within sight of bankruptcy several times: DJ sets ran at lengths broadcast radio couldn’t accommodate, mix uploads kept generating traffic after airing, and events branded under the station’s name could be pitched to sponsors already onboarded. It stayed on air because its sponsorship roster didn’t have to match a mass-market broadcaster’s.

In 2011 Taku took a guest slot on BBC Radio 1, then the biggest English-language dance slot open to a Japanese producer. The same year, “Incoming… TAKU Remix” took the Beatport Music Awards drum-and-bass annual #1, the first time a Japanese producer had won at Beatport, per his management.

By the station’s 10th anniversary, BLOCK.FESTIVAL had pulled in around 2.5 million cumulative attendees. block.fm was where Japan’s next generation of electronic producers came up—TREKKIE TRAX, tofubeats, Seiho, TeddyLoid, banvox, and KOHH—and Anime News Network credited Taku with putting KOHH on.

The March 2012 “fuck jpop” tweet was controversial. He clarified three years later in the Japan Times: J-pop, coined in the 90’s to separate Komuro and Misia from kayōkyoku, had 30 years on stopped pointing at anything—everything was J-pop now.

Taku told The FADER what he wants in new music: sample-heavy tracks which find themselves outside the commercial radio target.

Taku kept an obscure DRAWMER LX20 broadcast compressor on block.fm’s master output specifically because Daft Punk used it; he told Sound & Recording he wanted the stream to sound 海外のラジオみたいに like overseas radio.

Utada had given him the working frame for arrangement, per Natalie.mu—

「人が曲だとしたら、アレンジはいかようにも着せ替えられる洋服」

If the person is the song, then the arrangement is clothing—endlessly swappable in any way you like.

Taku answered—

「本質はメロと歌詞のメッセージだよなって」

The essence is the melody and the message in the lyrics, isn’t it.

Taku scored the 2010 Gainax anime Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and returned for its 2025 Trigger revival, where the new m-flo track “Reckless” sits alongside producers he’d platformed.

Teriyaki Boyz

Teriyaki Boyz, the parallel project to m-flo, came together in 2005 as a supergroup assembled by NIGO—Ilmari and Ryo-Z from Rip Slyme, VERBAL from m-flo, and Wise on the fourth mic—signed to (B)APE Sounds. Their debut Beef or Chicken had a production roster no Japanese act had previously assembled: Daft Punk, DJ Premier, Dan the Automator, Mark Ronson, Cornelius, and The Neptunes themselves.

More on NIGO and his legacy:

“Tokyo Drift,” Neptunes production, co-written by VERBAL, became the theme of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006 and went viral again on TikTok in 2020. On Music Station in 2008, Teriyaki Boyz and Kanye West performed “I Still Love H.E.R.” in brightly colored BAPE outfits with NIGO behind the decks, in the slot J-pop idols usually filled.

Star Trak was Pharrell and Chad Hugo’s label inside Interscope’s distribution; when the Teriyaki Boyz’ second album Serious Japanese shipped through them in 2009, a Japanese rap group on that roster meant Japanese-language verses hitting American retail at scale. What we saw were VERBAL verses, now sitting under Daft Punk and Kanye production. Pharrell phoned VERBAL at 6AM while VERBAL was on a morning run to commission Teriyaki Boyz for I KNOW NIGO.

VERBAL’s solo debut Visionair came out March 16, 2011, five days after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Promotion got canceled, and the album disappeared beneath the disaster coverage. VERBAL hasn’t tried for a solo comeback since.

AMBUSH

The jewelry line that became AMBUSH started as a workaround—pieces VERBAL wanted for the stage and couldn’t buy.

Yoon, at Boston University across the river from VERBAL’s Boston College, was a graphic-design student when they met. Her father had retired from the U.S. military and run a small restaurant with the family, Yoon told Vogue Korea—

“아버지가 미군에서 전역하신 후 가족과 함께 작은 음식점을 운영했다. 일요일에 교회 갈 때만 빼고 매일 16시간 이상 일하셨다.”

After my father was discharged from the U.S. military, he ran a small restaurant together with the family. Except for when he went to church on Sunday, he worked more than 16 hours every single day.

They became a couple, moved to Tokyo, and in 2002 started making custom jewelry for VERBAL’s stage looks because they couldn’t find hip-hop-adjacent pieces they liked. They married in September 2004. AMBUSH formalized as a brand in 2008.

VERBAL told PARCO—

「AMBUSH®のビジネスは自銭で始めて、最初の数年間結構辛い時があったんです…そのせいで一回コレクションをスキップしないといけないこともあったんです」

We started the AMBUSH® business with our own money, and the first several years had genuinely rough stretches… because of that, there was even one season we had to skip a collection.

Jewelry came first; apparel followed in 2015 to 2016, then an LVMH Prize final in 2017. In 2018 Kim Jones—who was introduced to Yoon via Kanye West—appointed Yoon as Dior Men jewelry designer, a role she held through 2023.

Yoon told Vogue Korea the timeline went further back—

“2005년인가, 2006년부터 칸예를 통해 킴을 만났다. 그 당시 그는 칸예의 라인 ‘파스텔’을 준비 중이었다…비통 계약이 끝난 후 그가 어딜 가든 나와 함께 가고 싶다고 했다.”

Starting around 2005, maybe 2006, I met Kim through Kanye. At the time, he was in the middle of preparing Kanye’s line, “Pastelle”… After his Vuitton contract ended, he told me that wherever he went, he wanted me to come with him.

Yoon described the SS19 finale to Arena Homme+ Korea—

“쇼가 끝나기 5분 전에 킴 존스가 내게 나오미 캠벨의 옆자리에 앉으라고 말했다. 피날레 무대에 나를 데리고 올라간다고 말이다.”

Five minutes before the show ended, Kim Jones told me to take the seat beside Naomi Campbell. He said he was bringing me up onto the finale stage with him.

AMBUSH was singular, operating outside the normal structure from its 2008 founding to the 2025 buyback, a 17-year streak, broken only by the 2020 Farfetch/New Guards majority sale; when the holding company collapsed, VERBAL and Yoon bought the brand back.

AMBUSH returned to independence on April 11, 2025, with VERBAL as CEO and Yoon as creative director, no longer employees of the holding company. With no outside board now, VERBAL chairs the production agency Kozm and in 2025 launched the Japanese sake brand Sōmatō with Yoon.

Yoon told WWDJAPAN why the buyback made sense—

「以前はイタリアで洋服を作っていたので、日本の職人やクリエイターと仕事が一緒にできず寂しかった」

Before, we were making the clothes in Italy, so I couldn’t work alongside the Japanese craftsmen and creators—and that was lonely.

「正直、ペースが速すぎた」

Honestly, the pace was too fast.

The Trio That Came Back Breathing Fire

After Award SuperNova topped Oricon at the start of 2008, the duo shipped three more studio albums—Square One in March 2012, NEVEN in 2013, and FUTURE IS WOW in 2014—then went quiet for five years while VERBAL built AMBUSH and Taku launched block.fm, scored anime placements, and ran TCY Recording. VERBAL was an original member of PKCZ when EXILE HIRO formed the unit inside LDH in 2014, alongside DJ MAKIDAI and DJ DARUMA, and the pause went unannounced.

In the early hours of Christmas Eve 2016, VERBAL was injured in a Hokkaido car accident while traveling to Sapporo with PKCZ to guest at a Sandaime J Soul Brothers concert, and LISA filled in as vocalist at an m-flo event. VERBAL described it to Nikkei the following year—

「ちょうど僕が座っている辺り、ワゴン車の後部右側に大型トラックが突っ込んできたんです。直撃でした。僕は右側の肩から背中にかけて肋骨が8本折れて、肩を脱臼し、内臓が破裂していた」

A large truck came slamming in right around where I was sitting, into the rear-right of the van. It was a direct hit. On my right side, from the shoulder down across the back, eight ribs were broken, my shoulder was dislocated, and my internal organs had ruptured.

Taku visited VERBAL in the hospital and proposed rebuilding the trio at the bedside; VERBAL pushed for early discharge to start rehabilitation and rehearsals.

In December 2017, the official account tweeted “WE ARE BACK” alongside the 150-song retrospective Universe. The Tripod E.P. 2 followed in March 2018—a sequel 19 years after the 1999 debut. LDH billed it as LISA’s 復帰作—the original member’s return record.

Taku told Mikiki what going back into the catalog felt like—

「過去のm-flo作品がすごく嫌いだったんです。でも、聴き直して〈あ、そんなに悪くないな〉というところから始まり…常に新しいm-floを提示していたのがm-floだなと」

I really used to hate m-flo’s past work. But starting from the place of listening back and going, “oh, it’s not that bad”… I came to think that what was always presenting a new m-flo was m-flo itself.

The ninth album, Kyo (November 6, 2019), stylized its title as 響 (echo) and worked across reggaetón, R&B, drum-and-bass, and anime tie-ins. Its centerpiece, “HUMAN LOST feat. J Balvin,” was the theme for the anime Human Lost; J Balvin is Colombian, like LISA’s mother.

A second loves era opened in 2020. Sik-K brought Korean rap from a generation that had grown up hearing m-flo’s cross-border bookings as settled precedent; he told VERBAL in their 2020 conversation that he’d first heard “miss you” in middle school as Cyworld background music. VERBAL had not known the song carried in Korea at all. chelmico brought bilingual comedy-rap energy the first loves cycle had never tried. Rip Slyme reunited with VERBAL two decades after the two acts had shared the same Oricon chart weeks in the early 2000’s—Ilmari and Ryo-Z from Rip Slyme had been in Teriyaki Boyz alongside VERBAL. Zico and eill on “Eko Eko” paired one of Korea’s biggest solo rappers of the 2010s with a Japanese singer-songwriter.

The release run into the album stayed dense through 2025—“HyperNova” with Maya the first new loves-credit in four years, a “come again” cut for THE FIRST TAKE, a Rip Slyme reunion, half a dozen singles in under a year.

Superliminal arrived February 18, 2026. Track 17, “come again *Reloaded,” recast the 2001 single with Sho Sakurai of Arashi on lead vocals—the same Sakurai VERBAL had mentored as a rapper.

NTV’s Best Artist in late 2024 was the first time Sakurai and m-flo had ever shared a stage. The surrounding guest list ran 14 deep across both loves cycles. Monocle described the lead single “Eko Eko,” released in June 2025 with Zico and eill, as “J-pop, K-pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music all in one”. The album treats the full catalog as available material—production signatures from the trio era, guest-credit conventions from both loves cycles, and the electronic textures of the duo years alive in Taku’s current gear.

LISA’s solo work after the split ran across a half-dozen labels—studio albums, mini-albums, singles, and a sideline writing and producing for other Avex artists—and kept her working through the years the loves cycle ran next door. She named Madonna’s overseeing of every production stage as the kind of control she wanted for her own solo ambition.

To Aramajapan she put the artistic argument this way—

“In Japan, we don’t really have singers that sing about sex … to me it’s like, ‘So what?’ … I wanted to bring something really raw and real there.”

On working alongside two men through the trio years—

“Being with two men was a lesson too because they are built different. They’re not women, so they don’t understand women.”

None of those records caught the pop reach of “Come Again.” Label after label kept trying to put her back under someone else’s production and concept, the producer-decides-everything deal she’d fought to escape.

In 2023 she reactivated DALI, a dormant rock unit, under the reverted stage name Elizabeth.

Too Pop for the Snobs

The method is a production duo as the act under its own name, the lead vocal rotating single to single, and every piece equal. They ran it from June 2003 on spec—no roster, no A&R budget, two names and a telephone—and made it. They didn’t invent it alone, however; everyone was reading the same Neptunes records. Star Trak’s feature vocalists came through label deals at market rates, and Timbaland and Missy were credited as producers-with-an-imprint, not as the act under their own name—the billing m-flo held on every loves single, and still hold today.

Teddy Park inside YG through 2NE1 and BIGBANG built a producer-auteur method where track identity—something THEBLACKLABEL has refined extensively—lived in the production signature and vocalists rotated across releases; Bang Si-hyuk and Pdogg inside Big Hit after 2013 rode the Bangtan records as a production house sitting at the table as co-principals; Min Hee-jin at ADOR pulled in 250, Peejay, and FRNK. Each ran producer-owns-the-act, singer-rotates—on salary, inside a company with a roster and an A&R budget behind them.

m-flo tapped into the mass listener vertical heavy, which the Shibuya-kei generation never could, and no Pitchfork, NME, Resident Advisor, Guardian, FADER, MTV Iggy, or Clash review of any m-flo studio album exists, still to this day. The Korean producer-led houses that came after m-flo—the YG, HYBE, and ADOR production builds of the 2010s and 2020s—are written up extensively through the same outlets, because they arrived on the Hallyu wave or other adjacent movement.

The group arrived in 1999 under a category that those outlets took for commercial product not in need of criticism. The indie outlets that skipped m-flo had spent the prior decade writing up Pizzicato Five and Cornelius, who worked the same origins to a fraction of m-flo’s domestic sales.

The producer-house machinery-turned-behemoth K-pop industrialized in the 2010s was running in Tokyo by 2003. Even if the reviews never came, the method came earlier, and stuck—adopted, refined, templated, then twisted beyond recognition.

“Welcome aboard on Global Astroliner!”

The reunions of SPEED, the 90’s girl group, and of Globe were both sold as fukkatsu—revival; most late-2010s idol-group reunions fit a similar pattern: a limited reunion built around an anniversary year and a tour pegged to a calendar round number, then a farewell-to-the-farewell that lets the label extract one more catalog cycle before closing the release schedule.

A Japanese pop act that wants to say it’s pausing has a small set of words to choose from. LISA mentioned the word hiatus hurt her heart.

The band wrote the word liminal.

The industry never found a word for their arrival; it doesn’t get to name this, either.