Def Tech | Profile Like Ketsumeishi, Def Tech cleverly fuses dancehall reggae and hip hop to create infectious summer party music. Their self-titled debut album was released by indie label Ill Chill in January 2005 and began a steady climb up the charts as the duo’s infectious feel-good vibe won more and more converts. Def Tech went to No. 1 on the charts and has sold over 1.1 million copies. Def Tech is a duo comprising Shen, who’s from Hawaii, and Micro, who is Japanese. They met through a mutual friend, Jesse, who is a member of Japanese band Rize, and they discovered that they had common musical interests. Shen was born in China in 1981 and was raised on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. After visiting Japan several times over the years, he moved to Japan permanently in 2002. As you might expect with a guy from Hawaii, Shen is into surfing, and that theme comes up a lot in his lyrics. Micro was born in Tokyo in 1980 and grew up in a musical household – at the age of two he identified a song playing on the stereo when he woke up as “Kaya” by Bob Marley. Like Shen, Micro is a surfing fanatic, and the surfing/island lifestyle is the common bond between these two guys from different countries. Shen writes the English material and Micro is responsible for the Japanese lyrics, and they both sing about the laid-back hedonism of the surfing/island lifestyle. This kind of Japanese-American musical collaboration is relatively rare, and in the case of Def Tech it definitely works. |
