MASK

Tohru Iioka, also known as Sofheso, a Japanese electronic music artist and bassist based in Sapporo. His musical career has begun in the late 1990s with the band Qodibop (1998-2012) where he was playing bass guitar and controlling all the electronic machines. From 2004 Iioka has started to focus mainly on his solo project Sofheso and DJing. Influenced by such unique experimentalists as Jan Jelinek, Frank Bretschneider, Vladislav Delay, Autechre or Mark Fell, Iioka has build his own complex and glitchy sound, which nowadays could stand in parallel with his beloved artists' production. Sofheso works are quite minimalistic, but at the same time very dynamic, saturated with thousands of different sound particles, tense atmospheres and future-thinking modulations. Everything is made with precision and devotion avoiding to follow any current musical trend. We should thank now defunct Wird-Middle record shop, where Iioka found all the amazing records from the outside world, which lead him to develop his musical taste, style and technique. There are some interesting facts about Iioka too. The first one is that in each of his live performances he presents only brand-new works and the second one is that since 2012 he uploads a new track to his Soundcloud page each Monday. Moreover, from 2006 Iioka is running Yuritona imprint, which releases limited-edition CD-Rs and cassettes.