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G.D.: What Japanese experimental artists influenced you the most? Where have you gotten your main inspiration?

G.C.: These guys come to Europe quite often, they played in venues in Paris, Cafe Oto in London and I saw Keiji Haino in Berlin, and at that time I was seeking for violence in music.  Violence has a lot of different forms, it is not only GG Allin puking and killing himself on the stage, and violence for me can be even stronger when it is extremely contained.  In Japanese culture, I don’t remember exactly what it was but I saw someone playing shamisen in the concert with the orchestra and I watched this guy who took maybe fifteen/twenty minutes to raise his hand up from down of his knees to his head, to play one note in a whole concert but he prepared for that one note for twenty minutes and that was the only thing that he did for that one and a half hour length show but that note just opened extremely violently the whole space. By listening to them I decided that music was a moment when you break a silence and you can always hear struggle between sound and silence in Japanese music. So I started to listen to a lot of Japanese musicians like Sachiko M, I believe she is still Otomo’s wife, I saw her once in venue in Paris and it was a two hour long concert and it was in front of 600-700 people, maybe more. She was alone, facing a table and for the first minute nothing happens, and after super long minute of nothing happening she pushed a button and the sine wave appears, like in Jo Ha Kyu beginning, and that sound stayed like this and she is again just standing and it was like that for one minute, two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes and the beginning of this you can hear people in the crowd moving in their chairs, some of them laughing, some of them whispering, nothing happens. Just at the end of that show, after 45 minutes of same sound, she did just some minimum changes in that sound, but of course she did some, because compered to nothing happening even small changes are something big and surprisingly at the end everyone was hypnotized, no one was moving at all and everyone was just hypnotized which impressed me a lot.  Talking about Otomo Yoshihide, he has piece called Red Consume that starts with a sample from LP of traditional Japanese music and when I listen to this piece it is so radical. Everyone around me at that time was listening to pop or classical music and in Japanese music I finally hear some real pieces that provokes very deep emotion and understanding of world through music if you take time to listen them. Also, Heino Keiji on stage, he just physically takes a sound out of the instrument that he is playing. So these three artists are extremely important for me.  But also, I’ve seen concerts with taiko drums and I saw it from the movie called Steps Across the Border and in this movie they show drum factory in Japan and you can also see all that ritual of drumming and I was fascinated by it.  This physical investment in drums and just the way they use this drum, one stich for very deep sound and other stick just slightly vibrating skin and making higher sound and the combination of it creates that tension that I love in Japanese music.  So Leonard Eto, who plays in the third part on the record in Jo Ha Kyu appeared because I really wanted someone who could create that tension with taiko drum.  And just after a while working with Leonard I realised that I heard him before playing with Siouxsie and the Banshees.  So actually I did not feel like mixing traditional music with modern music, because I believe that Heino Keiji plays traditional Japanese music, for me it is what traditional music became and if you listen to Kakushin Nishihara and the way she plays with her biwa it is same energy and the same approach and same way of using an instrument like Heino Keiji. For me this is just time, like time goes and we change and music changes and if you want to listen to what most of the people call traditional music you go to the museum and see how boring it is. To see all those people who try to play exactly the same way like it was played ages ago. We don’t care about that. So I did not have a feeling of doing some sort of confrontation between modernity and tradition. You know musical genres fusion? Like jazz mixed with electronics or anything else. I don’t like this word, I think with the fusion you loose something, you loose two things that were at the beginning and you get something new. I like collision, it is like to cultures, two identities that are on their ways for so long and on one point we don’t know reasons what happened but they just confront each other and from that you get a third thing without distorting first two and they provoke each other. And if this does not happen that culture just gets repetitive and kills itself. I met a lot of musicians in Mongolia who want to play in Paris in The Théâtre de la Ville but the problem was that their arguments were: I am a master because I play exactly as my grandfather was playing. And that is not true because you want to play in The Théâtre de la Ville and his grandfather was playing for his goats because that singing was supposed to help goats produce milk, this was the reason why they was singing back then, they weren’t singing for critical audiences which is our culture, they were singing for just ordinary life purpose. So when a guy tells you I am singing exactly as my grandfather was, maybe he plays the same notes but he loose the reason of singing. And the reason why we play music is the definition of musical culture. Some people play music to get access to invisible world or to become a man (go from child to adult). But don’t say that you do things as it was long time ago if you end up on a western musical stage.  I just don’t believe in this.  But if collision happens, and it confronts something entirely different, then it becomes interesting. 

G.D.:  When I was in Japan I felt something.  When you go in some sort of traditional place or even if you just listen to it, it is just does not feel real, with all of those costumes, it just brings a question, what this is?  This is not tradition, it is a parody of it. Their grandparents used this music and dances as way of communicating and it was a part of society and now people made a theater out of it. As you said they are doing everything in the same way, but they loose the purpose of doing it and it is a main thing of that tradition in a first place.

G.C.: Yes, this is a very similar thing. It has something very fake in it. But for example Leonard Eto, taiko player, he came to record Jo Ha Kyu with the whole traditional Japanese outfit and at first I was a bit skeptic about it. But he is good; I mean he is really good, really excellent musician. But it is a whole game, and it works, it keeps him busy: he has a takeaway in America, Italia and he is a part of a huge band and people like seeing these things because it imitates a contact with some strong, close identity.  Kakushin Nishihara, I asked her for biwa to Naohito and I had to pick her up in train station and I was expecting 60 years old woman with kimono and biwa, and she arrives with pink hair, tattoos on her face, long nails with many different colors and very free style outfit. For me it was very unexpected, and she carries this instrument that is 800 years old and she plays that repertoire from another time but all of her habits are from nowadays existence. Best thing is that she is not even conscious of this, she does not represent something, this is what she is, she learned those repertoires, she is an amazing musician and at the same time she wants to eat at McDonalds and she is an Instagram addict and she is a child of our time. Some people can’t decide how to bring traditional music into a modern place, but she does it without making decision of doing it, she is this. On stage on Kintsugi performance she has biwa and she has this score and she is extremely solid. Me and Serge Teyssot-Gay we just attacking her with guitar and cello sounds and we do some really hard stuff for her voice but she had not even slightest problem with it. Sometimes she would bring light sensors which would control a sound wave and make some really hardcore noise and after that she would just take her biwa and continuous singing. So she is a reincarnation of this modernity and tradition fusion process.

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