Casino Versus Japan is the recording name for Erik Kowalski (born May 5, 1973), a United States-based electronic musician from Lexington, Kentucky by way of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who produces intelligent dance music (IDM for short) with baroque melodies and distorted trip-hop beats. As a young boy in Wisconsin he recorded episodes of television series Miami Vice, sampling Jan Hammer's music, later collecting them, and playing them over the backdrop of other musical genres.