Time in our universe is always one way: no going back, no reverse. In music, you can reverse it!
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.
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.
The world is full of sounds. We just don't usually hear them as music.
I've worked with the same Prophet 5 Synthesizer by Sequential Circuit synthesiser for 40 years.
I want to be lazier. This is the luxurious dream I have: Doing nothing all day, just watching the clouds and DVDs.
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 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.
Time is the main subject for any musicians, music writers, composers.
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.
I've realised that if it is to remain relevant, contemporary music needs to change.
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.
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.'
When I imagine some music in my mind, almost automatically, I imagine the piano keys.
That's the meaning of 'The Revenant': It's a return from death.
For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.
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.
I love to be anonymous.
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.
Piano symbolizes interiority.
