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.'
Ryuichi Sakamoto
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.
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.
Time in our universe is always one way: no going back, no reverse. In music, you can reverse it!
I've worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.
I'm always looking out for interesting people.
The world is full of sounds. We just don't usually hear them as music.
I've realised that if it is to remain relevant, contemporary music needs to change.
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.
When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.
My concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise.
I'm very shy about seeing my own face on the screen.
I want to be lazier. This is the luxurious dream I have: Doing nothing all day, just watching the clouds and DVDs.
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 have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don't use them, they get stale.
I want to capture the mood I have now, post-cancer, in my music.
I loved the freedom of improvised music.
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.
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 know Brazilian music. I have worked with Brazilians many times.
We musicians often get inspiration from films and books or photographs, not only by music.
That's the meaning of 'The Revenant': It's a return from death.
For making music for myself, I just need to be happy. I'm the producer, the director, and the listener.
I'm not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.
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.
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.
Time is the main subject for any musicians, music writers, composers.
You can use existing music in a film, but creating a soundtrack is very different. One note can be enough.
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.
I love to be anonymous.
For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.
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.
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.
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.
The piano is the instrument I can play the most.
Piano symbolizes interiority.
I don't get so much inspiration from other musicians. Especially alive musicians. Late musicians are good - Bach, Beethoven - yes, good.
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 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.
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.
I was born and grew up in Tokyo, so I didn't know about nature.
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.'
Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me - it's all a huge circle.
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.
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.
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 easily fall asleep during a movie.
Although I don't understand Russian, I like the sound.
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 have a longing for violin or organ. Is it too simple to say those sustaining sounds symbolise immortality?
