The solo project of music producer, Takahiro Izutani from Tokyo.
Dugo is the solo project of Takahiro Izutani from Tokyo, which pursue the possibility on how to combine the sound of rock guitar influenced by modern Spanish flamenco that he think is the culmination of guitar music in the world with modern electronic sound in an organic form, and it represents the soundscape of his inner image and the landscape he has ever seen.
He has played the guitar in a prog rock band called Happy Family in the late 90's, and at the same time played the role of a producer of the band. He worked on two albums, which was released from Cuneiform Records in the US.
After the band broke up, he managed to build a bedroom studio and began to learn to make music using computers and digital audio. He didn’t meet almost anyone to focus on that for a year.
While doing so, he happened to get a offering to make a remix for a J-Pop group called PAMELAH. It was his first job as a professional music creator.
Since then he got to work on a number of productions for major artists in Japanese music industry as a remixer, arranger, and sometimes as a producer.
Just because working as a professional musician, it didn’t mean he gave up to be active as an artist. He has started his solo project around this time, and made the project name as Dugo, which means blood or family in Tagalog language.
One day in 2005, one of his friends invited him to some secret club party in Tokyo as a guest. He happened to get an opportunity to talk with Ian Pooley who was also invited to the party as DJ from Germany, then he handed over a demo CD-R to him.
Two months later, he got the offering to release the album of Dugo from Pooled Music, which was a label run by Ian Pooley.
He willingly accepted the offering, but even though he has completed 10 songs for the album, the distribution company that was the biggest in EU then was bankrupted at the last minute. So, the album release was stranded, because Pooled Music was working with that distribution company. And it was very difficult to make a new contract with another distribution company for a new unknown artist in such a confused situation of the music industry in Europe.
Dugo had to give up on releasing the album. Such an unlucky happening made him discouraged, but unexpectedly the track “Dublin” was picked up to be used for CSI: Miami Season 3 in 2006, thanks to Freibank Music Publishing from Germany. As a result, he became involved in music production for media. Among them, the opportunities to compose video game music increased, and gradually became known as a video game composer.
Although he was successfully working as a video game composer, In 2011, the tsunami that hit Japan and the disaster at the nuclear power plant changed his policy.
Since then, he has devoted his resources to acting as an artist again. He started Happy Family again since 1998, then released the third album in 2014. After the second hibernation of Happy Family, he finally released Dugo’s first album “Lingua Franca” from Brave Wave Productions in 2017 where he collaborated with Italian classical musicians and Canadian violinist.
Though it tends to be slow, he has been proceeding the production for Dugo, while working as a video game composer as usual . However, after being infected with COVID-19 and surviving in April 2020, He seriously has restarted Dugo, becoming to focus on what matters most in his remaining life. The tracks which are included in the latest EP “Recluse” was written partially when he was suffering from COVID-19. Now that many musicians try to change their activity to be able to apply for the situation of post-COVID-19, His resumption of Dugo as an independent artist can be a symbolic attitude for that.