A Quote by Ryuichi Sakamoto

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 had invented my own system, my own way of making electronic music at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and I was using what is now referred to as a classical electronic music studio, consisting of tube oscillators and patch bays. There were no mixers or synthesizers. So I managed to figure out how to make the oscillators sing. I used a tape delay system using two tape recorders and stringing the tape between the two tape machines and being able to configure the tracks coming back in different ways.
What is very interesting when talking about electronic music is that - I would say that rock and roll is called the ethnic music born in America that invaded the world. Electronic music is certainly kind of ethnic music born in countries like Germany and France that has invaded the world.
People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.
I love synthesizers and I love electronic music and I love the avant garde and I always want to try and have some kind of element of that in the music. So once the music is put down and recorded, that's when I start to tinker with it using synths.
In some ways it's hard to see electronic music as a genre because the word "electronic" just refers to how it's made. Hip-hop is electronic music. Most reggae is electronic. Pop is electronic. House music, techno, all these sorts of ostensibly disparate genres are sort of being created with the same equipment.
When I was a young student, I only listened to foreign music, mainly rock music and hard rock. Then I surprised myself by discovering ethnic music. Now I like to listen to music from different places, and in many situations. Even when you work, some ethnic music calms the nerves.
The place of electronic music, culturally and socially, is today completely different - it is now everywhere, and it has been totally accepted. Consequently, there is now a younger generation that is more focused on making great electronic music, good parties, and having fun, where there is not any more so much need for cultural and ideological statements in electronic music itself.
I'm trying to fly the flag for the days of electronic music where people who are making it are also building the gear because that was what was happening in the very early days of electronic music. And that spirit is one of the things that really appeals to me about electronic music so I'm putting this forward as a way to keep that.
It's a mystical quality of music, that music isn't really concrete, and it's communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music's like that. It's not real. It's unreal, it's all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.
I listen to a lot of religion-based music, culturally rich music. Ethnic and world music. Music from Latin America has been influencing me in particular.
I was interested in a whole range of music that I used to play, popular music -- particularly American music -- that I heard a lot of when I was a teenager," "I think at a certain point it dawned on me that myself playing this music wasn't very convincing. It was more convincing when we played music that came from our own stock of tradition. ... I certainly feel a lot more comfortable playing so-called Celtic music.
With electronic music it's often a little more hidden - the relationship between gesture and sound - which makes it confounding for audiences. But the ingredients of electronic music are the same ingredients of nonelectronic music.
Music is my life. Music runs through my veins. Music inspires me. Music is a part of me. Music is all around us. Music soothes me. Music gives me hope when I lose faith. Music comforts me. Music is my refuge.
The last thing I do is go and listen to heavy rock music. But I love electronic music. The purity of the tones is inspiring, because it's obviously much more controlled than a guitar tone.
A lot of people are going to hate me for saying this, but one of my least favorite kinds of music, or the kind of music that I feel I've so got out of my system, is musicals music.
Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever. Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history. . . . All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago. All good music, whatever its date, is ageless - as alive and significant today as it was when it was written
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