A conversation With takagi Masakatsu

Before diving into your latest work I would like to ask about your journey as an artist. On your website, in the earliest stages of your career, you describe yourself as a video artist. Earliest works like Rehome (2003, https://youtu.be/_h6luwK8zmI?si=8uYBSaU316W2NyX9), and Private Drawing (2003, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plLfiJpffVo), combine musical compositions with different types of visual constructions or digital drawings. How has your interest in this kind of artistic expression begun? And what drew you to music at first? Would images come before sounds? Not all compositions have videos, so how did you decide how and when a certain piece needs visual components? (http://www.takagimasakatsu.com/takagi-works/2018-j.html) Most importantly, do you believe it is the essence of the music you capture in the images, and vice versa, or is that not what you’d like viewers to focus on?


I think my passion for creation started in childhood. I always wanted to create something that felt good. If I read a picture book, I wanted to draw my own, and If I watched movies or played games, I wanted to create my own visuals and music. I am unsure why.

My sister had a piano, so I played it by myself. I would memorize music from TV or games, and play these melodies by searching for the sounds on the piano keyboard. When I was 12 years old, my mother had me learn how to play it, so I took private piano lessons (1 hour a week) until I was 18. I studied music like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Debussy. I always wanted to compose music but I didn’t know how.
When I was in high school, I became interested in film cameras and later started taking pictures with digital ones. I realized that if I wanted to capture a moment in time, I would be better off shooting a video and cutting out still images to create the work I desired, so I started shooting with a video camera. At University, I met a senior colleague, AOKI Takamasa, who makes club music, we hit it off and lived together. For two years I kept trying to make music videos for his music. Our unit name was SILICOM, and we released two DVD albums. I was not familiar with electronic club music at all, but I worked as VJ for some musicians including Haruomi Hosono, and Yukihiro Takahashi from Yellow Magic Orchestra. Later I collaborated with David Sylvian for his world tour as a video artist. So my career started as a video artist. I learned how to create visual works using a computer. That helped me to compose music as well. The software I used to make visuals was very similar to how I made music. My video works always had someone’s music attached to them, so I felt it was about time for me to create my own music.

Then, I went to Art Museums and saw Pipilotti Rist’s video works. It was really a shock for me. I’d never imagined we could show video works in the art world. I felt like I had finally found my way to go. I wanted to create video works like paintings or sculptures, as complete pieces of art.
I’d never been interested in creating videos merely for music at all. My video works just needed my music. When I created video works, visuals, and music were done at the same time.

The process was often lengthy, I had to wait to finish rendering video materials for hours or days. During the waiting time, I played and recorded music. I had no intention of making music suitable for the videos at all. Without watching video I could make suitable music for my video works. It was so natural for me to create visuals and music in the same feeling and mood. One would not come before the other.


I couldn’t find much information on your studies (only that you graduated from Kyoto Unversity of Foreign Studies) but I have read that your album Kagayaki (2014) takes its name after a class you’ve attended and that your piano playing has been partially inspired by a woman you’ve known since you were a kid, who would come next to your house while playing, and ride her bike around it. Could you tell us a little bit about how your passion for music has grown into a career, and how your studies have helped you (if at all) develop it? Have there been people, or moments you can recall that impacted you greatly?

I made the album ‘Kagayaki’ when my wife and I moved to a small village in the mountain area. It was such a pure time, everything felt new and shining (‘Kagayaki’ means shining). People living in the village were mostly over 80 years old, but we became very close and enjoyed life together. Most of them passed away in the following 10 years though, and we are still living in the same beautiful place.

Your mention of my old interview, it was about the town where I’d lived before moving to the village. I grew up in a new town where everything was newly built after carving the mountain. There was a girl with Down syndrome who lived a few doors down, and although I think she was a little younger than me, she always looked like a child. At school, she attended a special class called ‘Kagayaki (shining)’. While I was playing the piano, she rode a bicycle and started circling in front of my house. I loved that feeling, and it was my pleasure to play the piano just as she kept riding her bicycle in circles all the time. This feeling still keeps capturing my heart, and I think now in the ‘Marginalia’ project, I’m playing my piano to the nature around my house, hoping my piano will join in the joy of everything living.

Your first album Pia (2001), feels like the beginning of a long journey of musical experimentation, perhaps even discovery, of the sensorial world. As you would later mention in a 2014 interview with Shibana Nori (https://www.cinra.net/article/interview-201410-takagimasakatsu), you constantly care to “increase the resolution” by seeing things you didn’t see before – how has this shifted your approach to music production?

If we learn something, we can notice more tiny details. If we are able to throw away our assumptions, the new perception starts, and we finally can see the world as it is, like a newborn child. Music, especially sound itself, has the power to lead us to concentrate on pure feelings that we already have. I hope I will always pursue pureness, and be reborn again and again to see this world in happiness.

The video for Pia (2001) (https://youtu.be/NuXqZUQYZ60?si=SJ7JN6CIgXdEpGAC) has been captured in Cuba. In the same interview, you mentioned playing the Esraj, traveling to Mexico, explaining the necessity of moving to Hyogo with the desire to capture their wiseness, interested in the ways older generations could enrich your perspective on art and life. What has traveling meant for you? Does traveling and experiencing others in their element inspire you or do you feel like you become a truer version of yourself when immersed in different contexts? How does that, in your opinion, contribute to the development of your personal identity, and the development of your art?

For me, traveling is like experiencing my own childhood again. So I prefer to travel to places where old-fashioned life remains. I think it is very important for us to recall our childhood. We already understand essential emotions when we are children. Once we can take them back, we can go our own way, and live with calm and happiness.

I also noticed that even if not overbearing, in each of your albums different musical influences or rhythms are captured, how much do you value the incorporation of different elements in your compositions? What comes first (sound, rhythms, voices)?

I think the theme I want to reach is mostly the same. The difference in sound or rhythms is not very important. I’m always interested in some kind of “womb place”, I don’t know how to describe it with words. Some place where life comes and is born (and maybe not come and not be born at the same time). My grandfather is Buddhist and lives in a temple. I think that influenced me a lot.

Your work has been exhibited in Tokyo, Taipei, and Sao Paulo, the latest installation I believe was in 2020, at the Saitama Triennale. In the course of your career, recording and editing, have clearly posed as intermediaries between you, the audience, and the music, but perhaps, processes of visual constructions relate to the sounds much more than we understand. In One by one by one (2006) (http://www.takagimasakatsu.com/Video-Stills/Onebyone/page03.html) the lens paints the images in a klimtian way, in Tidal (2007) (http://www.takagimasakatsu.com/Tidal-still/page01.htm) the pictures are fuzzy, appear blurred, in 18 Portraits of Atlas (2007) (http://www.takagimasakatsu.com/Video-Stills/18-Portraits/page29.html), grainy, and squashed. Outside the context of the images existing as what we see, how do you understand them? Commissioned and non-commissioned work, I am sure are inspired by different prompts, but you constantly re-elaborate images by stretching out, in different ways, space. What are you trying to find?

I am happy you noticed a key point of my video works. Yes, my visual works are somehow the result of stretching out the moment. It is, once again really difficult to express. My mother had a friend who could see the world in a spiritual way. Similar to what you can see in the books of Carlos Castaneda or Paulo Coelho. I met her when I was 17 years old, and she showed me an unforgettable vision, even though I closed my eyes, I could see colors and lights. A different way to see the world. That experience led me to create video works.

In your earlier projects, like Eating 1+2 (2002), or COIEDA (2004) you use many more sounds and instruments. Each piece is by itself, unique, but aligns with the sentiment of the album. Comparing your earlier projects to the later ones, I felt like tumbling down a field, and then listening further ahead left wondering (observing) what surrounds the music, as if you are trying to cleanse experiences, and in the end, you are left with a pianoforte.

In the early days, I hesitated to use my piano, and my piano also had a few tones, and sounds. Somehow I was distant from the piano. When I composed the song ‘Girls’ in 2003, I finally felt I could use the piano my way. So after ‘Girls’, I tend to focus on it more. Since 2017, I have started to play my Steinway grand piano for recordings, with nature’s sound around my studio by opening the windows. I have many instruments in my studio like a Rhodes piano, Wurlitzer, organ, analog synthesizers, guitars, percussions, and so on. However, I am not using those so much for recordings, I play them just for fun or composing other music. After I find a melody or something, I prefer to play it on the piano. The piano is my favorite, and I feel I can do everything on it, hoping just my piano will do.

In albums like Rehome (2003), and Journal for People (2003), you repeat sounds much more than you do in your later work, the structures seem less flexible, and the flux of sounds focused, as if the study of a particular melody or a specific combination called your attention, unlike what listeners hear in Kagayaki (2014), where you also add lyrics (words help loosen sound?). As subjective, and probably confusing as it sounds, do your pieces reflect you as an individual experiencing the world, or an artist experiencing the instruments and sounds all around you? Is such distinction possible? How does the process of creating an album look for you?

I think my individual experience is all reflected in my works and I see other artist’s works in the same way. I can see/hear what the artist has experienced or how the artist sees the world, how to be connected to the world. My works keep changing from a sense of ‘only my generation and only my room’, to ‘with more unknown people’ into a more open ‘with surrounded nature, everything together’. Right now, I feel I create my environment with many living beings, and everything appears in my music, really. I made a small pond for rice agriculture, then many frogs and bugs came to live around my studio. The sound of my environment is completely different from before. So I am not only composing music with instruments, I am composing all the sounds together with other beings. That is my music and their music.

Some of your tracks are fairly short, usually they last three or four minutes, but tracks like Videocamera (18 min), Harmony (27 min), Nurse them Make a fire Feed yourself Express your mirth (10 min) seem to be constructed much more as stories than simple melodies. In particular, in Nurse them Make a fire Feed yourself Express your mirth, the tempo of the piano, violin, flute, and percussions, heavily relies on voices, on different natural or familiar sounds, just like one would expect to happen in theatre. How do these constructions come alive? Are they envisioned to be played live? – You have written the piece by yourself, and have performed it live with an ensemble in 2013. How many instruments are you comfortable composing for? Do you think of sounds as intertwined or interdependent? And how different or similar has your composition process practically looked throughout the years?

’Nurse them Make a fire…’ was recorded in a live performance, just watch the video I made on the screen; the violinist, flutist, and I played improvising. Because of my video (it was a mixed edit of footage from travel in Ethiopia), I think some kind of story was born.
Usually, I don’t think about what instruments I want to play with. It depends on the situation or timing, I just meet musicians and if we feel we can do something together, I write music for that combination.

For the ensemble, I like each instrument (or musician) to stand alone but also intertwine with each other at the same time. I’m not good for structured harmony. I prefer to build each melody, at times making harmonies coincide, just like nature does. Some birds start singing, others listen, and others start singing differently but also as a whole – there is a beautiful harmony of sounds. In a river, some water flows, some drops, some bounds, many actions, and many different sounds and rhythms, but as a whole, that is the sound of a river.

Kagayaki (2014), seems to be the first album dedicated more extensively to the piano, and with it, sounds of nature. In your interviews, you said it portrayed life in the countryside and included the sounds, the voices, and the feelings of living surrounded by a new community. It is the first album we hear you sing multiple times in, and in which you incorporate playing with nature, instead of reproducing or simply using its sounds. Do you believe this change has symbolized a shift in your passion for composing and playing? If so, how do you make sense of it?
I am now living in an old house surrounded by mountains. In my garden, there is a small river, and my land is so huge, that I can’t take care of everything. Every summer, I have to mow the grass so hard, trees grow so much and these days rains are horrible. I have to think about the route of sunlight, water, and wind. It takes time to care for the environment around my house, more than it takes me to create music. However, working with the environment is such a fun pleasure for life. If I do something to nature, it changes itself. If I could do good things to it, next year, everything will change in a good way. I feel this is the art. Art as a human being. Circulation – I believe we should find out how to circulate our environment including ourselves, and connect life to life.

You also mentioned a newfound freedom in living outside the city and cultivating the field, which has allowed you to separate making music and the financial stability that came from it. Have you then re-analyzed the ways in which you produced and viewed music before 2013? In the 2014 interview, you claimed experience as your source of inspiration, valuing the “enrichment” of your original self as allowing you to create great work. What is your view on these statements today? Was the production of music/video not as “great” when you were younger because you were not able to develop it outside of the possibility of profit? Or had it not reached a level of musical stability, as the artist, you were searching for?

I’ve not got any financial stability from music or videos. I think my financial situation has stabilized compared to my younger years. At a young age, it was so hard to think about the future because of financial difficulty (maybe many young Japanese share my experience?). I thought if I could just buy a big old house in an area outside the city where just a few people lived, and only nature surrounded it, I could start to handle my life as I wanted. Here, there is water, woods, land for vegetables, fresh air, space, and people who know how to live by themselves. They are the real stability for me.

About the music and visual works I made so long ago, I love each piece of my work. I don’t believe in growth on stairs, like right shoulder rising. I think we have a lot of ladders. Usually, we graduate from one ladder and go to another. Like children’s paintings. Their paintings grow up in some way, going from one style to another, from the abstract to the concrete. However, we can go back to the old ladder and still climb up more or use the ladder itself in unexpected ways. Also, we will notice the ladder does not exist in a linear shape, we will find ladders are sphere-shaped, and we can go anywhere. We already have many spheres in ourselves, so I just want to play there and enjoy my life.

In 2018 you began composing the first 40 Marginalia, a series of “recordings, which encompass a duality of simplicity as well as a vastness that comes from the freedom from life’s distractions” (http://www.takagimasakatsu.com/takagi-CV/CV.html). Although not for all, the feeling I get from this project is of a simpler way of producing music, but effective in its emotional dynamism, mesmerizing in its candor- which seems paradoxically less thought out than your pre-2017 works. Could you explain how this idea came about, and how differently or similarly you view Marginalia compared to your other productions? You describe the recording as capturing “harmony without any discrimination”, and I was wondering if you could elaborate further on this idea, as you are re-defining your role as a composer, and shifting the focus from capturing the sounds you’d like to hear, to allowing the sounds to be captured altogether. 

The reason I started "Marginalia" was my experience in the Solomon Islands in 2017. The Solomon Islands is a country made up of many islands, but the one we chose to stay on was remote, a really small one surrounded by the ocean, with nothing more on it other than accommodations. Every day, I dived into the sea and enjoyed the colorful coral, fish, and sparkling water. At night, the sound of the waves lapping gently gave me a sense of peace, as if I was being held by my mother. The songs of birds, the sound of waves, and the sound of the wind. Every day was very quiet, with no artificial sounds, but one night when I was sleeping, a sound started playing in my head. Don Don Don Don. A low tone was ringing in my head, like the sound of a bass drum in club music. I thought something was wrong, so I went outside, but the black ocean stretched out forever, and I didn't feel any sign of anyone. Eventually, my wife woke up and said she also heard a low sound. When I concentrated on the sound, it was doo-doo-doo. In addition to the rhythm from earlier, I heard a low melody that sounded like a bass. When I looked into the distance, I saw lights on an island far away. It is 20km away across the ocean. Even so, the music could be heard across the ocean. And the sound was definitely unpleasant.

At the beginning of the “Marginalia” project, I only recorded piano sounds even though I opened the windows, but I came to put another mic to capture the sound of nature together. These recordings are a real documentation of my life. No editing, no overdubbing, and no effects. When I played the piano before, I only took care of myself, but in “Marginalia”, I listen carefully to the sound from outside. You will notice very quickly, if you play the instruments selfishly, they stop singing and go away. If a big airplane comes across and makes a big low bass sound, they will stop singing for a while. That means their process for giving birth gets stopped. That invites less life to come in the future.  I heard that since 1990, we already lost 80-90% of insects from our world. This means we also lost birds who eat insects, lost numerous lives on this planet. I want to live in the beauty.

While I reached this kind of approach, my wife and I longed for our baby and made many efforts to have one. During the project of Marginalia, two kids came to our lives. I hope I will be able to keep our living environment fuller of life, with every being in harmony.

While you have continuously worked on Marginalia since 2018, you have composed music for different soundtracks, like Silent Rain (2020), Okaeri Mone (2021), Gifts From The Kitchen (2022), and most recently Worlds Apart (2024). Has your approach to commercial production changed, and if at all, in what sense? While you compose for shows, stories, or ideas presented to you as complete, are you able to develop music in a more personal way? Or do you still feel constricted by the production that surrounds them?

After the “Marginalia” project, my approach to the soundtrack has changed. I think I concentrate more just on sound, not music, melodic or harmonic composition. Recently my soundtracks feel more like air. My real life is becoming more complex and richer than a movie. Many unbelievable incidents happened in our small village. For example, I went to court and worked with the mayor to create new laws to protect our environment of life. It’s not like the movies, it’s endless and of a complex difficulty - real life. So honestly at times, it became difficult for me to enjoy the movies like I once did. When I get asked to make a soundtrack,  if I can’t grasp the core of the script properly, I try to find out where I could enjoy the movie, find out another line, another perspective. My perspective might be different from the director's, so making a soundtrack is really challenging by itself. It’s tough work but helps me to see a wider world. So as much as some would ask me to work together, I want to try.

These are some of the reasons why I started the “Marginalia” project too. Marginalia is like my own movie without visuals. I feel I’m making a soundtrack for my real life, really suited for it. I think I’m balancing other’s visions with soundtracks and keeping “Marginalia” for myself.

You have written a few pieces in Sotokoto Magazine, in which you not only share moments of your daily life and your family but of how you have felt about your work. For example, in the October 2021 issue (https://sotokoto-online.jp/diversity/10786), you spoke about finally being done with the musical production for Okaeri Mone, for which you had been composing music every day, for a year straight. Although you speak of it fondly, I am curious about how, if you feel like it does, your work as a composer influences or is influenced by your daily life. Having your study at home, and working on new projects by simply opening your window, do you ever feel unable to separate different aspects of your life? Is that a source of inspiration when writing more music? 

Working with somebody on a soundtrack for movies is like an unexpected meteorite suddenly falling in my life. I have to learn outside of my normal life. However, in most of the cases, I ended up finding something very important hidden deeply inside of me. I try to put everything I find into the soundtrack, but space for music is always limited. Many of the things that rose out of such processes, leaked out into my own works, and of course into my daily life. So it’s like a mixture of outside and inside.

Just like opening windows to let music in. Unexpected sounds come into my studio, and once I decide that I will never neglect even a tiny small sound of nature, the music I play definitely changes, remembering the hidden memory of my own life. That is how the melody appears, music comes unexpectedly but at the same time, in an already familiar way. I really think, as I’ve been working on art, and music, I just recall all my life, especially childhood, to draw the circle of life.

In 2018, you published Kotoidu (Unsure if it is spelled Kotoizu), a series of essays you’d been collecting for the previous six years. In it, just like you did for Sotokoto, you write about your life in the village, and how different interactions, or local stories, have impacted your perspective on life. When did you begin writing down snippets of what you saw, and how did this process transform into the publication of the book? How does this book reflect the evolution of your compositions, maybe explaining them, or how is it different from your music?

The book ‘Kotoidu’ is a collection of my essays from 2012 to 2018. A Japanese magazine asked me to write an essay every month, and they made a book of the collection. My essays are similar to my music. At first, I didn’t know how to write essays, so I made up a simple routine.
At the beginning of the essay, I simply write what I see when I do so. If it’s raining outside, I write about it. If  I hear some sounds, I write about it. Then I write something I want to write, something I’ve felt recently. Finally, in the last paragraph, I try to connect the middle to the beginning, like drawing a circle. It’s the same as my music creation process. First, carefully accept the reality in front of me, bring something from my own soul, and let them merge in harmony.

Lastly, on your website (http://www.takagimasakatsu.com/index.html), you’ve organized Marginalia by Recording Date & Time, adding what natural elements you’ve played that piece with (and the original songs you are playing). What is the reason behind this classification? Is it another way, just like you did with the essays, to track the events in your life? Or are these grids the visual representation of Marginalia as you understand them, just like you have had visual correspondents to your previous works? 

It’s just for fun. For example from that list, I can see my tendencies. I can see what season or time I was able to play music in. I see my “Marginalia” project as a documentary of the relationship I have with nature. I feel like throughout these 8 years of “Marginalia”, the sound of the outside is shifting into a more colorful one. More birds, more frogs. During Covid-19, it was really silent, with no artificial sound in the air. I can hear the difference in rain. I’ve been preparing a music sheet for the “Marginalia” project, extracting the notes I played with nature exactly, as much as possible. They are a trace. Trace of me living in the mountains together with lots of beings and phenomena. Some days these records might be interesting to someone, or some creatures from another planet.