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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Power Nature Music

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

Music Wrong Wow

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Us UN 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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Sympathy God Where

Time in our universe is always one way: no going back, no reverse. In music, you can reverse it!

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Time Music You

I've worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Work Years Year

I'm always looking out for interesting people.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Ways Way Tin

The world is full of sounds. We just don't usually hear them as music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Music World Usual

I've realised that if it is to remain relevant, contemporary music needs to change.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Music Change Van

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Power Nature Music

When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Music Us Tom

My concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Music Us T

I'm very shy about seeing my own face on the screen.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Very T Shy

I want to be lazier. This is the luxurious dream I have: Doing nothing all day, just watching the clouds and DVDs.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Watching Watch Want

I'm really bad writing the chase scenes or fighting scenes. I'm much better for writing, like, a more melancholic or tragic music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Music Writing Us

I have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don't use them, they get stale.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

You Use Us

I want to capture the mood I have now, post-cancer, in my music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Music Want Us

I loved the freedom of improvised music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Music Love Freedom

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Time Technology Positive

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Time Worried Were

I know Brazilian music. I have worked with Brazilians many times.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Work Time Music

We musicians often get inspiration from films and books or photographs, not only by music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

That's the meaning of 'The Revenant': It's a return from death.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

For making music for myself, I just need to be happy. I'm the producer, the director, and the listener.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

I'm not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Time is the main subject for any musicians, music writers, composers.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

You can use existing music in a film, but creating a soundtrack is very different. One note can be enough.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

I love to be anonymous.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

The piano is the instrument I can play the most.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Piano symbolizes interiority.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

I don't get so much inspiration from other musicians. Especially alive musicians. Late musicians are good - Bach, Beethoven - yes, good.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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!

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

I was born and grew up in Tokyo, so I didn't know about nature.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.'

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me - it's all a huge circle.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

I easily fall asleep during a movie.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Although I don't understand Russian, I like the sound.

Ryuichi Sakamoto

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!

Ryuichi Sakamoto

I have a longing for violin or organ. Is it too simple to say those sustaining sounds symbolise immortality?

Ryuichi Sakamoto