With your career having spanned the analog to digital eras, what do you see as the pros and cons of the '80s way of making a record versus now?
It's all progress – we improve on something, but we also lose something. I was lucky that I got to start in '80s, because I did get the experience of recording to tape – beautiful analog sounds and 24-track recording – which meant it's not an infinite recording. You have to make a lot of decisions while you're doing it. The performance has to be central, since there were not many post-production possibilities. But, when I started I was playing digital equipment, because I wasn't able to execute my ideas on analog instruments. For me, digital equipment was great; it enabled me to express what I wanted to. But it also has limitations that are very different from analog instruments. The analog era is something we can never go back to entirely, even though many people still try to record on tape, we're now mastering on digital. Even if you print finals to tape, there's some range that's not there anymore – the mid-low range of it. The old recordings had some dark matter that made us feel something, and that's not there anymore. I don't hear it, even on the vinyl. I know a lot of people are releasing vinyl today, but still, I don't hear that older quality in new recordings. As the method has changed, our minds have changed, and we all make music differently. Even the most analog musicians have a different standard, because we're living digital era. We're used to hearing music that is made digitally. Our standards are changing.
What was some of the digital equipment you were using in the 1980s?
I was using a Korg SQ-10; a very primitive sequencer that you wouldn't believe now. It was like a calculator. [laughter] I'd hit three eighth-note buttons to create dotted quarter-notes. When I would copy four bars and try to make eight bars, the machine would add a little bit of space in between. The machine was not precise, but very raw. My first sampler was an Akai S900. It was 1 MB. It used a floppy disk, and it took a long time to load. A very long time.
Yeah, right.
At the time, a lot of people felt resistant about these machines, because they imagined that they came in in order to replace existing instruments. But to me they just made different sounds. The Mellotron violin is not a violin, it is a new sound. That's how I felt with sampling. I was also exploring the fact that I could reverse the sound. Reversed, or in a different range, it would create a sound that I hadn't heard before. That's what I was really into it. I had all of the Akai samplers up until the S6000.
What do you use now?
For me, a very important factor for instruments is that they're portable, because I also like to play live. My sampler now is my laptop. I use mostly Ableton Live, and another sampler called norns [by monome]. This is a really fun machine. It's basically a Raspberry Pi computer in a small machine. It's open source – many people are writing codes and inventing new instruments for it. I do a lot of live sampling to norns and control it with this monome controller called grid. I started using Ableton Live in 2000; around the time they started. I sample people I perform with on the spot, and then I replay the sounds in a different range, or with a different effect. But it's the same source. The person may be playing a trumpet, and I sample the trumpet and then replay it, but placed in a different range or at a different starting point, and then looped. You'll hear the sound that's corresponding to the acoustic player, but it is processed in a different way. I'm very interested in creating atmosphere that can relate to the immediate circumstances, but that is also different. I think it's the magic of music that we can change the atmosphere we're in and get transported to a different realm, which is what I need to do with the sounds.
That sounds amazing – like a new way of having a conversation. I wanted to ask about your relationship to food and music. On the first Cibo Matto album, Viva! La Woman, almost every song has a food-related title, like "White Pepper Ice Cream," "Sugar Water," and "Know Your Chicken."
Yes, yes, exactly. I was naturally interested in food, because – like many people who are interested in food – that was my primary relationship to my mother, who I've had complex relationship with. But she made incredible food. [laughter] Food was the highlight of my day when I was a kid. The relationship between food and music is because I don't make music to realize any technical ideas. What I really want to express in music are feelings and emotions, and those are what's stored in my memory safe. This food made me feel like this, or this sound made me feel like that, or this book made me feel like this, or this scene in this movie when the light changes. In my odd file mind, in some way food and music are interchangeable. That's why I thought that the connection between music and food is not that far-fetched. I was surprised that so many people thought it was a strange communion, especially in America. With Cibo Matto, we have noticed that nobody in Japan wondered why we made that connection. Culturally, Japanese people are very emotional. When we speak to each other in conversation we use a lot of sounds rather than words. We don't always describe things in words. There are a lot of times in communication that what happens in place of words are a spontaneous, improvised sound or gestures which can mean like, "Wow, that's amazing!" or "Can you believe that?" So, we go like, "Hmm-ahh-oooh-woo" vocally or whatever, instead of trying to describe it in words.
That sounds very musical. I know Japanese itself is frequently listed as one of the most musical languages in the world, along with Italian and others.
Yeah, it's very musical. We're used to using sounds for emotions. I have noticed when I'm rehearsing with Japanese musicians, if I say that as a request, "Can we make this part a little bit more like the quiet before storm when we can't really see anything?" they will usually be able to understand and translate that. But it doesn't make my American cohorts happy because they're like, "But what does that mean?" [laughter] "What do you want me to do?"
They want something concrete.
Yeah, like, "Do you want me to stop playing there?" or "Do you want me to play this chord? Or what is it you want from me?" In America, I have had to rely on technically expressing what I mean, but in Japan I can use metaphors. People then play their own interpretation of what I said. They don't feel that method is weird, and I'm starting to think it's because of the way we converse in Japan. I was just talking with a Taiwanese friend, and I asked her, "Do you miss talking more regularly with Taiwanese people"? She said what she misses most is the nonverbal elements of conversation, where she can make a symbolic sound and the other person understands.
That's interesting. You said that Japanese people are "very emotional." A common misconception in America and Europe is that Asian people are stoic, passive, or even "submissive."
I find Japanese people to be very emotional, but not so much outwardly, which is due to being polite in formal settings. That is done so that that your emotions don't "take over the place." That is what we're thinking and have concerns about in more public settings.
Culturally, there is an other-centered focus.
Yes.
One thing I've read about with Japanese music and art is wabi-sabi, and the appreciation of imperfection – with tone, texture, and timbre being the major factors in music. The significance of noise, decay, and silence is what I've heard is a big part of traditional music in Japan.
A lot of Japanese traditional music from the past sounds very sad to us. They're all in a minor key. They move minor to minor, and they used to make funny sounds, like, "Woo-ooo." I don't know what they meant, and how people were perceiving it. I understand that some of that music was for entertainment purposes, so even though they sound sad to us now maybe they sounded exciting to audiences at the time. I think it's because Japan is a small island far away from everything, and with music, or any culture, when it travels overseas something gets washed off. When I was a kid, there was only one record shop in my town. That's where I bought Fellini soundtracks, rock music, classical music, and reggae. This one tiny shop had everything. They were all "Western music" to me. [laughs] Western music was just one big thing, and I didn't hear the difference between The Beatles and The Godfather score. It was all foreign ingredients. When you live in Japan, things like hip-hop or punk came, but the social background didn't come with it. Just the sound comes to Japan, so we're using these sounds as ingredients without the social issue attached to them. There's some unintentional freedom that happens when you have the sound without social information attached. I think that's why some people think I'm bold in the way that I mix different ingredients. Because of this background of being Japanese, in a way, to me everything is foreign. I can just mix them all easily.
You're probably the only person that's produced both John Lennon's wife, Yoko Ono, and his son, Sean Lennon. That must have been pretty interesting to be in the midst of such a culturally significant family.
