Last year I paid a sobering visit to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial. Formerly known as Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, it's the only structure that remained standing within the atomic bomb’s blast zone. “Little Boy” destroyed an astonishing 69 percent of the city’s buildings, and killed between 90,000 and 166,000 people. 

Today, the memorial – a hollowed-out husk of its former self – symbolizes the extremes of human capacity: a horrific tolerance for destruction and the resilience to rebuild.

“My family was actually in [the bombing],” said the artist Hachi Mugen. “Some of them lived through it. My grandma [from Hiroshima] has a lot of stories – she's 98 years old, living in Orange County, California.”

Originally from Los Angeles, the man known across web3 as Hachi Mugen (an alias, he’s never been doxxed) has been living in Japan since 2016. 

“I got away from America because of the record labels,” he said, speaking from his home in Kamakura, a seaside city that once served as a political capital in medieval Japan. “I thought Japan would be different, but it's kind of the same. I feel like I'm in the same space I was in 2007, so that's why I came into web3 – to break this mold and start something new.”

As the music lead for DRiP, a creator platform built on Solana, Mugen is helping a community of artists form their own direct-to-consumer lines, bypassing old school industry machinations rooted in competition and exploitation. 

Last week, building toward that “something new,” he helped launch DRiP’s first collaborative compilation album: DRiP Vol. 1. The multinational effort features 13 independent artists that met one another on the platform. For Mugen, it’s the latest step in his own journey to rebuild.

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Mugen first traveled to Japan in 2014. He made the trek to play a pop-up show for his friend’s clothing brand. At the gig he met ELLY, a member of the Japan Record Award-winning (the country’s highest music honor) J-Pop group, J Soul Brothers. “I was like, ‘Hey, this is my first time in Japan,’” Mugen remembers saying. “It's my dream to move here one day – when I come back, let's connect.”

In 2016, when he moved to Tokyo, they did link up. Mugen would contribute to three of the four tracks on NEOTOKYO IV, an EP ELLY released under the moniker Crazyboy. The record topped Japan's Billboard charts in 2018. 

That collaboration had a “domino effect,” Mugen said. Over the next few years, he worked with some of the country’s biggest stars: pop artist and actor Jin Akanishi; the rest of the J Soul Brothers; and rapper JP the Wavy, who rode his 2017 viral track “Cho Wavy De Gomenne” to international fame. 

During the pandemic, while Japan’s music scene lay dormant, Mugen discovered web3. He followed on-chain anime projects like 0N1 Force and Azuki to web3 music platforms like Audius and Sound. Somewhere between them, he saw an opportunity to break through the sameness. “I wanted to take my PFP [profile picture] and do something aside from my ‘in real life’ music stuff,” he said. “I wanted to do worldbuilding and lore around my character.”

Via the crypto creator platform Vault – which DRiP acquired in July – he introduced the world to Hachi (two other people have helped him develop the character). “Hachi comes from this area called the Enclave, which was destroyed,” Mugen explained. “He has to figure out how to build his community back up. 

“And that's parallel to what I'm doing with the music community in web3,” he continued. “We're at a point where the music industry is in turmoil. It’s a restart, right? And that's the same thing in our storyline: everything's broken – how do we rebuild it?”

In December, Mugen became one of DRiP’s first creators (today there are more than 1,000 across various mediums). He gradually unveiled Hachi’s story, leveraging engaging visuals, narrative and lo-fi music – “I wanted it to be universal,” he said, “no words, just easy listening.”

The platform had just revealed their on-app currency, Droplets. For Mugen, the micropayments system worked well, but as the number of creators grew, so did the competition. Success became elusive – especially for DRiP’s music creators.

Music, generally a more time-intensive artform, can struggle to compete on multi-format creator platforms that reward frequent, consistent content. On DRiP, that's led to a misconception that the ecosystem doesn’t have much musical talent.

“We actually really do,” said Mugen, who became DRiP’s music lead in July. “And if we do something right and really make a good body of work, I think that will be respected amongst the whole space. That's what I really wanted to do on this first one – prove a lot of those naysayers wrong.”

Mugen began gathering DRiP’s music artists in Telegram. “I started adding all the musicians that were getting on-boarded and having conversations with them every day,” he said. “I wanted to build a place where we can converse, share music and just talk.”

The idea of a collaborative compilation album emerged organically. Mugen became the project’s de facto creative director, and then tapped Italian engineer and music producer Majko to be his “second ear.” In total 13 independent artists – representing Nigeria, Russia, the UK, the U.S., Japan and Italy – contributed to DRiP Vol. 1. 

The album arrived on Nov. 12. It’s the first release from VOLUMES, DRiP’s new artist hub for community collaborations. Each of its seven tracks – which span genre and aesthetic, from the spacey Eurodance of “Go to You” (by SAEKKO and Youknowkeegan) to the soulful lo-fi of “Truth,” Mugen’s collab with Emily Faye – costs 10 droplets (1,000 droplets equals $1). All money raised is being directed to emergency response funds to help people rebuild after Hurricanes Helene and Milton. (The Giving Block and DRiP are each matching all donations.)

Vol. 1’s album art was created by Victor Shevchenko, a friend of Mugen’s and the graphic designer behind Kanye West’s recent records, Vultures 1 and Vultures 2. “On the cover, the DRiP logo serves as a portal,” Shevchenko said in a statement. “This portal leads to an unknown future, a new way, through light, vibrations and music – an immersion into a new world. In the background, you can see a series of other portals, indicating that this is the first but not the last release in this project.”

Mugen is already thinking about the tough task of curating an inevitable DRiP Vol. 2. Today, the Telegram group has ballooned to 120 musicians, and 120 minds imagining new ways to challenge conventional creator economics and distribution systems. As they do, the lore of Hachi Mugen unfurls alongside:

“Hachi awakens from a long recovery to discover a changed world,” reads the snippet attached to the song, “Sensei DMC.” “Noco, his loyal companion, has crafted new tools and uncovered hidden truths that will reshape their journey. As they set out together, the stakes are higher and the challenges more dangerous in their relentless pursuit of infinity…”

Progressing together, of course, is anyone’s best shot at disrupting an industry that’s gotten very good at upholding the status quo. A “new way, through light, vibrations and music” is long overdue. And that would be a foundation worth rebuilding from. 

lead image: Hachi Mugen