After finishing a month long visit here in New York, next year the Red Bull Music Academy will be packing its bags and head to Tokyo, Japan in October 2014. Fans, musicians, and other up-and-coming talent who’s trying to make it in this industry will be required to register again at the top of next year!

Tokyo is one of the world’s most iconic cities – a place that tends to inspire mythic re-imagining. It’s also a city of contrasts: a place where J-pop stadium spectacles abound, but where collector culture thrives and connoisseurs of obscure funk, soul, audiophile equipment and electronic music abide. Japan is a country that has long embraced the soul in the machine, whose composers, equipment designers and game soundtracks have had an inestimable influence on modern music. Need we mention Roland drum machines, Akai samplers and Pioneer mixers? Perhaps Tokyo, the original urban jungle, with over 13 million inhabitants, is a place where the ancient past and the recently imagined future are deeply entwined, and vestiges of old Edo underlie the city’s sprawl. If you were to draw a map of Tokyo’s cultural spaces, it would be like a circuit board made up of myriad connections and switches: You’re just as likely to find an eye-opening contemporary art exhibition in a quiet and nondescript suburb as you are among the neon canyons of Shinjuku.

If you want to get an idea of what’s to come, check out the few pictures that was taken at the Red Bull Music Academy Weekender — which happened last weekend in Japan’s capital. Over the course of four days they had eight shows, a culture fair, in-depth semimars in Tokyo’s museums, galleries, and premiere clubs, and many conceptual performances. Guests featured Daedalus (who DOOM sampled from for the song Accordion), Gilles Peterson, DJ Krush, Yann Tomita, and Damo Suzuki’s Network. Check them out below!

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