“I’m just delighted to be living, to be able to have a simple conversation, to feel a ray of sunlight on my skin and listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree.”
“Hopefully, we will become a stronger democratic society and avoid falling into xenophobia. Hopefully, we build good relationships with our neighboring countries and, rather than acting for profit for the current generation, acting in a way that will ensure we leave natural resources for future generations.”
“In Japanese culture, there is a belief that God is everywhere – in mountains, trees, rocks, even in our sympathy for robots or Hello Kitty toys.”
“Music is like nuclear plants. In a way, it’s true! Music is totally artificial. Still using some material from nature, a piano is assembled with wood and iron. Nuclear power uses material from nature, but it’s been manipulated by humans, and it produces something unnatural.”
“I was working with the computer at university and playing jazz in the daytime, buying west-coast psychedelic and early Kraftwerk records in the afternoon, and playing folk at night. I was quite busy!”
“I want to be lazier. This is the luxurious dream I have: Doing nothing all day, just watching the clouds and DVDs.”
“I have a cultural map in my head, where I find similarities between different cultures. For example, domestic Japanese pop music sounds like Arabic music to me – the vocal intonations and vibrato – and, in my mind, Bali is next to New York. Maybe everyone has these geographies in their head. This is the way I’ve been working.”
“A young musician needs a powerful laptop and a good analogue synthesiser.”
“I’m not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.”
“The world is full of sounds. We just don’t usually hear them as music.”
“My main interest in synthesizers when I was an older teenager was to escape from the spell of the 12-tone system or, in a more broad sense, the spell of the European modern-music system. That led me to explore towards electronic music and ethnic music.”
“Our body is part of nature. Our creations, they’re not natural. We build things that aren’t natural, but our bodies, they’re part of that system.”
“You’re changing every day, right? Your curiosities and ambitions change, your ear changes, the music you like changes – and the music you want to make, too.”
“I am worried that young Japanese people are not very curious about the outside world – which is so different to the way we were in the Sixties and Seventies. All they want to listen to is Japanese pop. They haven’t even heard of Radiohead!”
“I was born and grew up in Tokyo, so I didn’t know about nature.”
“An artist’s initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer of paint to fill in details often diminishes the painting’s aura. When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back.”
“Since the early 1990s, I had been very worried about the state of the environment, and by the end of that decade, I realized I needed to do something about it.”
“Art is often defined as a famous masterpiece in a gallery, and we are meant to visit the work and view it to appreciate it. But that is not all there is.”
“Hollywood is a double feeling. Love and hate. With a talented film director, I cannot resist. They are such charming and intelligent people. But each time, it is very difficult to deal with other people. I have to satisfy other people. The director or the producer. Not me. I have to satisfy myself. But then I have to deliver my music.”
“It was a very rare moment in Japan after the Fukushima nuclear plant accident. Ordinary people went out to the streets to speak anti-nuclear sentiments.”
“I’m very shy about seeing my own face on the screen.”
“I easily fall asleep during a movie.”
“Conceptually, I am open to mistakes – errors, actually. I do play lots of wrong notes while I am making some music, and a mistake or a wrong note is like a gift for me: ‘Oh, wow, an unknown sound or an unknown harmony. I didn’t know about this.’”
“Although I don’t understand Russian, I like the sound.”
“Time is the main subject for any musicians, music writers, composers.”
“Time in our universe is always one way: no going back, no reverse. In music, you can reverse it!”
“I was aware of that theme of mortality in my music since around 2009. The decaying and the disappearance of the piano sound is very much symbolic of life and mortality. It’s not sad. I just meditate about it.”
“Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me – it’s all a huge circle.”
“I have a longing for violin or organ. Is it too simple to say those sustaining sounds symbolise immortality?”
“We musicians often get inspiration from films and books or photographs, not only by music.”
“I don’t get so much inspiration from other musicians. Especially alive musicians. Late musicians are good – Bach, Beethoven – yes, good.”
“Each time I work on a film, I say to myself, ‘This is it. This is the end.’ Because it is so stressful, it’s like torture.”
“It’s a very intimate, closed universe, doing my own music. It’s just me, basically. I have to inspire myself; I have to do everything by myself.”
“Ever since I was 18 or 19, I’ve wanted to question the sound, tones, and scale associated with the piano as an instrument symbolic of modern European music.”
“I’ve realised that if it is to remain relevant, contemporary music needs to change.”
“Looking back at my early career, I had a positive view of technology and its potential. It was a happy time, that’s for sure.”
“I wanted to hear sounds of everyday objects – even musical instruments – as things.”
“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.’”
“I’m trying to relax, but it’s hard.”
“I have been a long time fan of Jean-Luc Godard. It’s my dream to work with him.”
“The first music I got really into was Bach.”
“I always think about music horizontally and vertically at the same time.”
“For making music for myself, I just need to be happy. I’m the producer, the director, and the listener.”
“Without the knowledge of music, it would be very hard to write film music. There are so many films, and each one has a different historical background and everything.”
“Piano symbolizes interiority.”
“In the old days, people shared music; they didn’t care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.”
“My concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise.”
“Playing in London in 1979 was exciting: it was at the start of new wave, the transition period after punk, and there were a lot of radical, fashionable young people on the streets and in the venues.”
“For me, change doesn’t happen on a linear basis; it zig-zags back and forth.”
“When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.”
“I’m a terrible drummer; I almost cannot play the guitar nor sax nor trumpet.”
“The piano is the instrument I can play the most.”
“I honestly like any sound. Birds. I have a very broad space to accept or enjoy anything except quiet.”
“I know Brazilian music. I have worked with Brazilians many times.”
“Playing jazz in restaurants is too stereotypical.”
“Japan used to be an animistic society before Shinto imperialism was established. But most of us still have an animistic sense.”
“Japanese people can feel some attachment in what they are making, whether it is a car or a TV or a computer.”
“I used to know things intellectually, but now I feel them. Now I feel that my body is part of nature, so being sick is just a process of nature, and death is a process of nature, and being reborn through the soil is a process of nature.”
“I’m fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound: a sound that won’t dissipate over time. Essentially, the opposite of a piano, because the notes never fade. I suppose, in literary terms, it would be like a metaphor for eternity.”
“To record the perfect album. That is my dearest wish.”
“I hope to record the perfect album, my masterpiece, before I die.”
“As soon as I choose the timbre of an instrument, that dominates how I compose.”
“I think there’s a genuine difference between the real and the virtual in music.”
“I had never really liked the music by Gabriel Faure, but just by chance, listening to some pieces by him, I got very interested. So I listened to almost everything. All the pieces written by him. I was digging deeper and deeper. I’m not sure I still like his music or not, but it’s interesting.”
“I want to capture the mood I have now, post-cancer, in my music.”
“I have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don’t use them, they get stale.”
“When I lived in Japan, I only noticed the bad aspects of the country. I didn’t really like Japan then, but when I moved overseas, I was able to appreciate the good side more.”
“My interests are moving toward both ‘sound and music,’ not just ‘music.’ I have been doing lots of field recordings and also collecting lots of strange sounds.”
“People don’t buy CDs so much anymore because it’s easy to download everything. So, while the record industry is declining, the music is heard a lot more than before.”
“Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.”
“For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.”
“I loved the freedom of improvised music.”
“I love to be anonymous.”
“The piano is the closest instrument to me in my life, so it’s just natural to play my pieces on the piano.”
“All the kids at the kindergarten had to play, or at least touch, the piano. It was a good start. Then, after kindergarten, all my friends took piano lessons, so I joined them.”
“To show my everyday life to the world was not my intention.”
“Just recently, I thought about how maybe I should have kept using the synthesisers more after ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’; then, I would have been a more unique soundtrack composer than I am now. It could have been my signature. But then, probably, Bertolucci would not have offered me to compose for his films.”
“When we went to see the first rough cuts of ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,’ I fell to the floor because my acting was so bad. I wrote music to compensate for my bad acting.”
“You can use existing music in a film, but creating a soundtrack is very different. One note can be enough.”
“I’m really bad writing the chase scenes or fighting scenes. I’m much better for writing, like, a more melancholic or tragic music.”
“I used to work, like, for 16 hours a day, or sometimes 24 hours.”
“That’s the meaning of ‘The Revenant’: It’s a return from death.”
“I’m concerned by a deficient technology. In other words, errors or noises. It absorbs me, and I wonder if new cultural currents could emerge from this deficiency.”
“I’ve worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.”
“The global view of cultures is part of my nature. I want to break down the walls between genres, categories, or cultures.”
“I’m always looking out for interesting people.”
“Somehow, I see music as a garden which has a lot of different styles: contemporary, classic, ethnic, Japanese, rock & roll, and so on. I can enjoy them all, and there is space for them all.”
“Water is not free anymore. Our resources were free at one time, but now they are not. Everything is getting controlled by big corporations. I’m most worried about this.”
“I have to follow my instinct and intuition and curiosity.”
“The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.”
“The key concept is to open your ears. Music can be here and there, anywhere surrounding you.”
“I’m lucky that I have people listening to my music, waiting to see me in North America.”
“It’s all very well to say this or that on Twitter and Facebook, but ultimately, if you are a musician, it is going to carry more weight if you make your statements through your craft.”
“In Japan, there has always been a small number of musicians who have been outspoken on social issues, but they tend to be dismissed as radical.”
“I like to write film music that stands on its own.”
“My audiences are generally mixed. Some people like techno, others are into the pop music, and others enjoy my film music.”
“When I do one thing for a long period of time, my attention is usually then drawn in the opposite direction.”
“I was really into the music of Cream after I finished composing the music for ‘BTTB.’”
“In the 1980s, Josef Beuys planted the seed that activism could be considered as art. I am influenced by the idea of his idea of social sculpture.”
“I don’t really know about the art world.”
Leave a Reply