The Buddhist monk who creates meditation music with beatboxing

Yogetsu Akasaka is the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk who creates meditation music using beatboxing and a loop station.

Yogetsu Akasaka is a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk who creates meditation music and deeply relaxing through the beatboxing and technique of overdubbing. With his voice he is able to reproduce any sound, from that of the drums to mantra chants, which he then reproduces and overdubs thanks to the use of a circuit station.

His compositions of pure voice with Buddhist chants, sutras and mantras are quickly becoming viral and his YouTube channel now has almost twenty thousand subscribers from all over the world: the video will be released in May Live loop remix of the Heart Sutrain a very short time, it reached almost five hundred thousand views.

The history of Akasaka and his meditation music

Akasaka is thirty-seven years old and has become Buddhist monk in 2015, following in the footsteps of his abbot father at a temple in rural Iwate Prefecture. Before this, however, he was an artist and musician. During his adolescence in Tokyo, he played the guitar and became interested in beatboxing in his 20s, when he was given a CD by a Japanese beatboxer named Afra.

In 2009 he started using his first Boss loop station. Just before becoming a monk, he was part of a theater troupe in Fukushima Prefecture and has also been a full-time busker in various countries, including the United States and Australia.

Once a monk, the next step was to use his greatest giftthat is, his voice, to compose religious songs. «After I came back from temple training, I thought I wanted to do music again, but I wanted to do something both as a Buddhist monk and as a musician,» he told the South China morning post, «I was a little scared because no one had done it yet – it was totally out of tradition. But as soon as I tried it, it looked really good, so I thought maybe I should do it for other people. When I did it, they liked it too.»

Since then, Akasaki has brought his own spiritual music in different and decidedly unusual environments and contexts such as music festivals, corporate events and conferences: a way to try to change minds about Buddhism, which in Japan has a negative image and is often associated with sad moments such as death and funerals. But for Akasaka, Buddhism is actually a religion for living peacefully and without pain, and the sutra, or canonical scriptures, can help heal people’s hearts.

Akasaki’s live stream during theCovid-19 emergency

Due to theRoyal-19Akasaki’s performances have stopped (for example, he should have also performed at the Nicona Chokaigi festival in Japan where he already played in 2019, organized by the largest Japanese social video website Ninterno), and it is precisely because of the forced stop that he decided to publish his videos on the internet, so as to be able to give relief to people in such a difficult moment.

Its popularity has spread not only to other Asian countries, but even to the whole world, from the United States to Europe. After this unexpected success, Akasaki decided to broadcast live in English in order to respond to the comments of its many followers.

Akasaka acknowledges that the current situation in the world is the real reason why so many people everywhere have become passionate about his music: «I’m sure people are really looking for more healing and less suffering (…) What I’m trying to do is make people experience something spiritual or maybe a certain state of consciousness. Live looping has the potential for that: supporting the meditative state of mind and allowing people to experience a spiritual feeling.»

Some of the videos that Akasaka publishes on his YouTube channel last more than an hour and a half: streams that offer him the opportunity to vary the musical and spiritual themes and allow listeners to use the videos for practice meditationjust like they were mantras.

There are also many comments from those who use his music for research relaxation and mental calm before sleepingjust as happens with the much more famous ASMR videos.

«Maybe as my music spreads more and more, I can help people heal more and more. For me, if I can do that, that’s amazing,» says Akasaka.