Top 60 Ryuichi Sakamoto Quotes

The key concept is to open your ears. Music can be here and there, anywhere surrounding you.

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!

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.

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

A young musician needs a powerful laptop and a good analogue synthesiser.

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 have been a long time fan of Jean-Luc Godard. It’s my dream to work with him.

I wanted to hear sounds of everyday objects – even musical instruments – as things.

The piano is the instrument I can play the most.

I used to work, like, for 16 hours a day, or sometimes 24 hours.

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

I have to follow my instinct and intuition and curiosity.

I’m trying to relax, but it’s hard.

I was really into the music of Cream after I finished composing the music for ‘BTTB.’

I hope to record the perfect album, my masterpiece, before I die.

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.

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.

The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.

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

Playing jazz in restaurants is too stereotypical.

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

Asian music influenced Debussy, who influenced me – it’s all a huge circle.

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

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 lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don’t use them, they get stale.

For me, change doesn’t happen on a linear basis; it zig-zags back and forth.

Japan used to be an animistic society before Shinto imperialism was established. But most of us still have an animistic sense.

I think there’s a genuine difference between the real and the virtual in music.

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.

To show my everyday life to the world was not my intention.

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.

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

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.

The first music I got really into was Bach.

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

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.

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.

Piano symbolizes interiority.

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’m not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.

I’m lucky that I have people listening to my music, waiting to see me in North America.

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.’

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

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

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.

I’m a terrible drummer; I almost cannot play the guitar nor sax nor trumpet.

I honestly like any sound. Birds. I have a very broad space to accept or enjoy anything except quiet.

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 piano is the closest instrument to me in my life, so it’s just natural to play my pieces on the piano.

As soon as I choose the timbre of an instrument, that dominates how I compose.

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.

I always think about music horizontally and vertically at the same time.

I easily fall asleep during a movie.

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

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

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.

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

The global view of cultures is part of my nature. I want to break down the walls between genres, categories, or cultures.

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.