I don't really know about the art world.
— Ryuichi Sakamoto
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.
My audiences are generally mixed. Some people like techno, others are into the pop music, and others enjoy my film music.
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.
The key concept is to open your ears. Music can be here and there, anywhere surrounding you.
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 always looking out for interesting people.
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.
That's the meaning of 'The Revenant': It's a return from death.
You can use existing music in a film, but creating a soundtrack is very different. One note can be enough.
To show my everyday life to the world was not my intention.
I was born and grew up in Tokyo, so I didn't know about nature.
I loved the freedom of improvised 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.
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.
I want to capture the mood I have now, post-cancer, in my music.
I think there's a genuine difference between the real and the virtual in music.
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.
I was really into the music of Cream after I finished composing the music for 'BTTB.'
I like to write film music that stands on its own.
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.
The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.
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.
The global view of cultures is part of my nature. I want to break down the walls between genres, categories, or cultures.
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.
I used to work, like, for 16 hours a day, or sometimes 24 hours.
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.
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.
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!
For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.
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.
I have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don't use them, they get stale.
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.
As soon as I choose the timbre of an instrument, that dominates how I compose.
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.
When I do one thing for a long period of time, my attention is usually then drawn in the opposite direction.
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.
I'm lucky that I have people listening to my music, waiting to see me in North America.
I have to follow my instinct and intuition and curiosity.
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.
I've worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.
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'm really bad writing the chase scenes or fighting scenes. I'm much better for writing, like, a more melancholic or tragic music.
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.
The piano is the closest instrument to me in my life, so it's just natural to play my pieces on the piano.
I love to be anonymous.
I'm not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.
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.
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.
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.
