capsule FLASH BACK interview for traksy

reporter: Fujimoto Kouichi
publisher: traksy (Yamaha-owned electronic music outlet, defunct)
published: November – December 5, 2007

Between his songs for Perfume, the idol group who just broke through at the beginning of this year, his production of Suzuki Ami and MEG, a TV drama soundtrack and a multitude of remixes, Nakata Yasutaka’s sound has now so thoroughly permeated the media and the streets that you can’t go a day without hearing it. capsule, both the origin point and front line of this top creator, will release their new album FLASH BACK on December 5th.

In this interview, we asked him all about the latest album as well as his industrious music activities as a whole. Read on for our look into what could be called the latest fashion in Nakata Yasutaka’s sound, capsule’s new album FLASH BACK, and the force behind that explosive momentum currently widening the scope of his activities.

I want to ask you about your latest album FLASH BACK. I often hear that you prioritize concepts in your work, so was there any concept you kept in mind when producing this album as well?
I think you could say that. I more or less felt like I was making music separate from the music I’m requested to produce for others. Something I wouldn’t be sure about until it was finished… Not made with a tie-in or special project in mind first. Plus, when I’m commissioned to make something, those people will always be thinking of my old works. I decided to make music that didn’t fit into any of those preconceived notions, like something I could only create through capsule.

I see. Does that mean there’s any special meaning to the album title FLASH BACK?
It’s just the literal meaning of the word “flashback” as it’s used in video editing for movies and things like that, but I thought there was a link between that method of gathering footage from all over the place and splicing those clips in small, short increments and the sort of starkly contrasted feel of the music I’m doing now. I don’t mean in the chronological sense of splicing together “retro” and “modern” or “past” and “future,” but I chose the phrase because I wanted to express a more sensory form of cutting and chopping.

Including your remix album [capsule rmx], FLASH BACK marks your tenth album release exactly. Did you have any special thoughts or feelings concerning that?
None whatsoever (laughs).

You debuted in March of 2001 and have totaled ten albums over roughly six years. I personally consider that to be an awfully fast pace (laughs).
I suppose so, although I’m not that conscious of how much I’m producing. I can’t even remember all the titles of the albums off the top of my head (laughs).

(laughs)
With each one, I was always working from the perspective of “What can I do that might be interesting?”, so before I knew it, I’d reached ten albums.

Judging by FLASH BACK’s album cover, I felt as if your visual presentation has gotten more provocative, but is there a connection between the evolution of your sound and that of your visuals?
It’s all related. But I think most of the people who regularly attend the events I run, for example, perceive [those changes] as normal. When you think of capsule just in terms of our music, though, I think you’ll only see those differences with each new album we release.

Speaking in terms of its sound, I feel that FLASH BACK acts as an extension of your previous album, but what perspective do you have on that?
That’s true — if you look at them piece by piece, they’re different, but from the perspective of people whose sensibilities are similar to mine or people who connect to us more in areas besides music, it might not be such a big change. They just feel different because you’re thinking about the music genre. It’s the same as language, where the same words can have a different meaning. Like with “cool” or “cute,” even if the same people point out the same thing and call it cute, the images that flash in their minds will each be different. The changes in capsule’s music are like that.

You always include an instrumental track at the beginning of your albums. Could you tell me about the intention behind that?
I don’t think anyone is ever immediately in music listening mode when they play a CD. For me, when the first track opens with a bang right from the start, with no preamble and all the instruments coming in at once, I have to start over from the beginning even if I’m in the middle of listening to it (everyone laughs). Have you never experienced that? (laughs) Thinking “Oh, it’s started!” and hitting the pause button, then starting again from the beginning only after getting into the proper position to listen to it… They’re just introductory tracks for the purpose of reducing that labor (laughs).

Listening to “I’m Feeling You,” the sixth track on FLASH BACK, I thought that compared to the strikingly conventional ‘80s sound heard on “Sound of Silence” from your last album, this one felt closer to the modern sound being produced by artists who’ve been actively releasing music since the ‘80s, like Kylie Minogue, for example. The eighth track “Get Down” has that dated kind of aerobics feel on the face of it. In our last interview, you talked about the ‘80s feeling new precisely because people don’t know it, but I feel that you may have progressed one step further ahead by bringing that variation to the sound. What do you think?
I feel like there’s really no such thing as old or new anymore. I started making electronic music from quite early on, so I went through a phase where I thought FM synthesis or whatever was uncool, but that’s also exactly why I can have fun with it (laughs). “Whoa, this is so lame! … But isn’t it kind of cool?” You can make something kind of iffy like that. Like you’re actually enjoying it even while you’re saying “That’s so lame!” the whole time (laughs). Around the ‘90s, there was an idea that everything that had been popular a little bit earlier was the most uncool of all, but that isn’t the case anymore, and no matter how you make it, everyone will find their own way to appreciate it, so I didn’t want it to be like that either. I thought what actually made it cool was that element that makes you think, “What’s the deal with this?”

It definitely came across in the aerobics vibe of “Get down” that you were having fun with the tackiness of it (laughs). I asked you a little about this earlier, but capsule has put out ten albums in less than seven years, and in the meantime, you’ve also done work for COLTEMONIKHA and Perfume and begun to produce artists like Suzuki Ami and MEG. That’s an enormous workload and an incredibly fast pace to maintain, I think. Do you ever consider taking a break?
Mmm, I don’t think about it too much. I don’t actually know what taking a break really entails. So even if someone forced me to take time off, I wouldn’t know what to do… I’d just end up thinking, “Well, why don’t I just play around a little?” (laughs)

If anything, your music activities might just be an extension of your own pastime.
That’s true. Whenever I get a day off where I don’t have to do anything, that’s when I end up playing around and making music with my friends. But then, since I have that outlet, capsule is where I can “challenge” myself rather than “experiment.” If I made an album as “experimentation,” it’d be too fanatical and niche. I use ridiculous sounds or sounds I’ve never used before [when making music just for fun] that I couldn’t do in a song I needed to release. Maybe I’ve spent less of my time off lately really doing nothing at all.

Moving on to a different topic, one of your recent activities was the LIAR GAME drama soundtrack. You’ve made soundtracks for movies and other projects before, but this was your first time working on a drama. How was it?
I could do what I wanted, so it was really fun. The director was flexible about the result just needing to be good and match the concept, so there was no precedent that it needed to “sound like whoever” or anything like that at all. That made me feel motivated to give it my best effort, too. He showed me illustrations of the set designs and told me which scenes were going to be filmed where. Based on that, I’d think about what kind of sound I could lay over those scenes. That level of freedom made it really easy for me to work.

That’s an uncommon way of doing things when it comes to producing music for a visual medium. Usually, the music is written in accordance with the length of each scene or the timing needed to move the story forward, but each of the tracks on the LIAR GAME soundtrack functions as its own independent “song.”
There were quite a few songs that didn’t get included… I actually made dozens of songs. Because there needed to be music for fight scenes, for instance, or music for scenes where the characters are talking, and it was left up to me to decide what kind of music to pair with each of those scenes within those constraints, so I wrote a few songs to go with each of those concepts and then the director would choose from them and decide when he wanted them to play… That was the procedure we followed for it. I’d thought that [the timing of where the music was inserted] would’ve been handled more by the sound crew, though. When I watched the actual drama, there was a sense of speed to how the songs were used that felt like a music video and it made them sound cool.

I got the impression that you had a similar approach in the creation of both capsule’s new album FLASH BACK and the LIAR GAME soundtrack. Were there any commonalities in your production process or where you focused your attention between the two?
With capsule, I often bring in a visual concept when I create the sound. From the perspective of working with other people, capsule is a unit that’s led by me personally, so I’m not typically conscious of the vocalist either [due to Koshijima Toshiko being the fixed vocalist] and I can mostly focus on just making music.

I sometimes pick up on a sort of duality in your recent music. There’s your pop side as heard in the work you’ve done with Suzuki Ami and MEG, for example, and then a more niche side like capsule’s new album and LIAR GAME. But I feel like there’s some overlap in the period when capsule was your core outlet as a unit you’ve spearheaded and can do more freely and the phase when you started making pop music as part of your production work.
They all influence each other. I’ve included those [pop] elements in capsule in the past as well. Something like LIAR GAME uses sounds that wouldn’t appear in my production of another artist, and on that level, I’d like to do more soundtrack work in the future, but… Instead of classifying something as pop or not pop, maybe it’s a question of time. For my part, I think of capsule [now] as pop, too. Pop music becomes pop music once it’s categorized as pop, right? It’s something that's decided later on [rather than consciously intended to be pop from the beginning]. People who set out to make pop music [consciously intended to be such from the start] are making pop music after it's already been considered pop, which essentially isn't pop in the true sense of the word…

I see. That means the question of whether you were conscious of making pop music in the act of creating it is another conversation altogether.
That’s right. I think pop music isn’t made, it “becomes” pop. A certain genre will turn into pop all of a sudden. When I consider it from that perspective, if a large number of people can listen to something like Perfume or MEG and hear that as pop, then I think it'll have “become” pop.

But did you ever think about whether or not listeners [of these songs produced for other people] would easily identify that music as “pop” while you were working on it?
I do think it offers a greater sense of security. Unlike capsule, I always make that music with absolute confidence that it’ll turn out well. With Perfume, I can’t just tell them “I’m going to go ahead and take that first verse out, sorry” after they've already recorded the vocals for it (laughs). Maybe it's pop in the sense of being music with clear prospects. Between that kind of security and more of a suggestion, I thought maybe capsule should be a suggestion.

Ever since a certain point in time, I got the sense that you’d started to become more aware of that — capsule being a suggestion. I thought at the beginning of your career, you were much more cognizant of including those more “comfortable” aspects in your work.
That’s true. But I’m not that conscious of it when I’m working. Of course, capsule’s FLASH BACK is the newest album I’ve made right now, so maybe that’s why I feel like that. When I was working on [Suzuki] Ami-chan’s music, I felt like, “Is this OK?” No matter what it is, I always wonder “Can I do this?” when I’m working on something.

I do suspect that capsule might be like your essence, or even your truth.
It feels like laying down railroad tracks. With capsule, I lay out the groundwork, but my other production doesn’t just follow that in a musical sense. It paves a path so that each thing I do can move ahead in the direction it should go. capsule tows and clears the way for that. But I don’t think I have to do everything on that newly made path, and with capsule, I do it from the perspective that it’d be interesting if everyone could listen to [the work made through that process] as pop later on. That sense of never knowing how something will turn out is what makes capsule the most fun for me.