Top 50 Ryuichi Sakamoto Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I loved the freedom of improvised music.

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.

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.

I easily fall asleep during a movie.

To record the perfect album. That is my dearest wish.

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.

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

I love to be anonymous.

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

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

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

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

I have to follow my instinct and intuition and curiosity.

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.

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!

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

Without the knowledge of music, it would be very hard to write film music. There are so many films, and each one has a different historical background and everything.

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.

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 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’m not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.

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

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

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.

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’m always looking out for interesting people.

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.

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’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.

Playing jazz in restaurants is too stereotypical.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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

Each time I work on a film, I say to myself, ‘This is it. This is the end.’ Because it is so stressful, it’s like torture.

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.

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