Among the international acts billed for the Tribe of Nova / Universo Paralello Israel festival on October 7, 2023 was a Tokyo psychedelic-trance DJ listed simply as “Spectra Sonics (Japan)”. His real name is Masaya Ikeda; in Japan he is better known by his original DJ alias, DJ MASAYA. He arrived at the festival site near Kibbutz Re’im just as Hamas began its assault, was shot at, sheltered through the day with other survivors, and eventually made it back to Japan — where, more than two and a half years later, the experience still defines his daily life.
Who is Spectra Sonics?#
Masaya Ikeda has been DJing professionally since 2005. After a youth spent absorbing rock and club music, he moved into the Japanese psy-trance scene and is now considered one of its central figures, performing under the artist name SPECTRA SONICS (a.k.a. MASAYA). He is affiliated with the K-HOLE and N.P.S. collectives, and joined the international psy-trance label Grasshopper Records in 2010. His releases include the EP Voyage (2011), the album Sentimental (2015) and the mini-album REVIVAL (2017). His touring profile by 2023 already spanned major festivals across Asia, Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East — Israel had been on the map for the Japanese psy-trance community for years, partly through the legacy of Goa-trance and Israel’s outsized place in the global psytrance scene.
His public channels: Instagram, X / Twitter, Facebook, and the SPECTRA SONICS YouTube channel.
The trip#
According to his own October 17, 2023 YouTube testimony — later picked up by Japanese outlets Kai-You, Maidona News and Daily Sports — the trip went like this:
- October 4 — left Japan.
- October 5 — arrived in Israel.
- October 6 — spent the day relaxing in Tel Aviv (he singled out a beach burger), then played a club warm-up party in the city that night.
- Overnight into October 7 — travelled south to the festival venue in the open desert near the Gaza border.
- ~06:30, October 7 — roughly thirty to forty minutes after arrival, the attack began.
The attack and escape#
The first sign was rockets overhead. “I lay face-down in the middle of the party,” Masaya recounted of the moment incoming missiles hit. When the music stopped and gunfire began, the crowd scattered for vehicles.
His group drove out, but the road was already blocked by gunmen. A bullet struck the centre of the windshield; another set of rounds passed through the cabin between the driver and front passenger seats. They abandoned the car and ran.
Sheltering at a roadside gas station, Masaya saw what was happening at scale: the CCTV monitors inside the station were showing people being shot and falling. It was at that moment, he says, that he believed he was going to die.
「殺される。時間の問題だなと思った」 “I’m going to be killed. It’s just a matter of time” — that’s what I thought.
He phoned the people most important to him to say what he assumed would be goodbye. Around him, others did the same.
Eventually IDF soldiers reached the gas station and moved the survivors to a temporary shelter closer to Gaza, where they stayed for roughly twelve hours until it was judged safe to leave. From there he was driven to a Tel Aviv hotel with an underground bunker, where the air-raid sirens forced repeated runs into the stairwell over the following days.
A flight home, organised via the Japanese embassy, eventually got him out on October 11.
Aftermath#
Back in Japan, Masaya posted his account on YouTube on October 17, 2023. The video was widely covered by Japanese music and general-interest media as one of the first first-hand Japanese accounts of the Nova massacre. (Both that video and a follow-up have since been set to private on his channel — likely a personal choice as he continues to recover.)
The aftermath he describes is, in his own words, a serious case of trauma. He has spoken about becoming hypersensitive to ambient sound, wearing noise-cancelling headphones almost constantly, and — most painful for someone whose entire livelihood is built around it — being unable to listen to music. His doctor’s prognosis, as he relayed it:
「時間をかけて治していくしかない」 “This can only be healed by giving it time.”
Why this matters here#
Among the 364 people killed and 44 taken hostage at the Nova festival, the foreign-national casualties have been disproportionately concentrated in the migrant-worker communities — Thai farmworkers above all, then Nepali, Filipino, Sri Lankan and others — a story documented in our report on the silenced victims. Spectra Sonics’ story is a different cross-section of the same event: a Japanese musician in Israel for the same reason thousands of Israelis were there that night — to play and to dance — caught in the same attack.
It is also a reminder of how tightly the Japanese and Israeli psy-trance scenes have been bound together for decades. Israel is one of the global hubs of the genre; Japan is another. Lineups crossed regularly before October 7, and the artists, fans and labels in both countries are still working out how to make sense of what happened to one of their own.
If you want to support Masaya’s recovery, the most direct way is to follow him on his official channels and engage with his music when he is ready to put it back out into the world.
Sources#
- Kai-You — イスラエルで攻撃に巻き込まれた日本人DJ、帰国し現地の状況を伝える
- Maidona News — 「殺される。時間の問題だ」イスラエルでテロに遭った日本人DJ
- iFLYER — DJ MASAYA artist profile
- Psymedia — Tragic terrorist attack rocks Universo Paralello Israel warmup party
- Wikipedia — Nova music festival massacre
- Embassy of Israel in Japan — Oct 7 Nova memorial post
Featured image: still from the SPECTRA SONICS testimony video on YouTube (October 17, 2023), via Internet Archive.
