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My music is the music of my tribes.
In the beginning,
there was this magazine who asked me an interview,
for a special Yoshimi feature.
At the time, I was so tired of interviews
that I gathered a few friends to make a fake band and do the interview with me.
At first, we weren't even an actual music band.
This is why we are a girls band.
There are no other good reasons.
-That dude, there, that's the guy who draws the Simpsons!
-Waaah ! Amazing!
I do compose a little in the Boredoms,
but all my ideas are filtered through Eye.
He's the producer.
He's the one who gathers ideas.
It's different with OOIOO.
I always start songs,
but then everyone comes and "drink" at my ideas,
and whatever comes out always surprizes me.
I find the process very interesting.
For me, a band is like a collective,
a mix of people.
It's like waves piling up on top of each others.
The band becomes a tribe.
Or a country.
My music is the music of my tribes.
I'm really interested in the sounds of Ainu music.
But what I'm mostly interested in is the way they use voices.
They have a special ear for the sounds of polyphony,
and they use them a lot.
If I must compare it with noise music,
it's a "hardware" based type of music,
it still interests me a lot.
Noise music brings us back far in time.
I see a link with Ainu, with the people of Okinawa,
those ancestral people whom I find fascinating.
In the old days, before Japan was unified,
before it saw itself as an island, people wanted to evict them.
I'm not all that knowledgeable when it comes to history,
and I don't know if there's a connection between the fact that they were ostracized and their music,
but it really fascinates me.
The drum set is a human,
completely unnatural invention.
Whenevere I hear a drum sound,
I think of new-wave music, which I like a lot.
In general,
I tend to see musical instruments as gifts of the gods,
just as natural sounds are.
But the drum set and the piano are obviously human inventions.
And I find those unnatural instruments quite funny.
I grew up in the countryside. And I remember,
when I was a child, there was a paddy field behind our house,
and I paid a great attention to the noises
made by frogs when they started to call.
Whenever a frog with a different voice would join,
the others seemed afraid and shut up all at the same time.
Then, little by little,
they would start croaking again, like that...
All at the same time.
Then all of a sudden, they would stop again,
simultaneously.
Years later, on a trip to Bali,
I discovered Kecak music,
and I wondered if Indonesians
hadn't taken inspiration from frogs.
I don't have a masterplan for my career.
Daily life, for me, means raising my kids.
In Japan, music that sells is always J-Pop,
pop songs sung by idols,
made for TV,
and there are thousands of them.
This scene I belong to,
it's a minority.
Success or failure,
I'm incapable to tell the difference.
It's a blurry line.
All that matters for me is to do what I like.
Me and my bands,
it's not like we sit around together and grin about all that money we're going to make!