I was making that sort of minimal music. It was kind of like the songs John Cage made with radios, or Steve Reich. When I played live at the art school or somewhere I would use a radio or tape player. Then I would take an MV, a big pipe like this and put the speaker here and then the mic here to create something called “howling,” a shrill sound, and I would have it go through tape recorder to make sounds. I did all kinds of experimental stuff like that. Noise all seemed a bit easy, and I had this image of how a beautiful sound is made in my head. So I compiled a bunch of those things I did, edited them and then released them as my album Objectless. As it happens, I had pretty much forgotten about the Objectless tape, but then this German guy who runs a label somehow had a copy of it and came to me saying he wants to re-release it. I don’t have any of the original recordings anymore, so the first thing I asked was for him to send me the data, the digital version. It was all stuff I did when I was really young and I was a bit embarrassed to release it as-is, so I said that I would remix the original, and this will come out in December. And that’s on VOD Records from Germany, Vinyl-On-Demand.

When did you start getting inspired by more 20th century avant-garde art like, for example, Surrealism, Dadaism, Bauhaus and Futurism?

The first thing was probably that cover for Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine that I saw in the record store. I really wanted to know what it was, so I did some research and found out it was in this Russian Constructivism style. From there I stumbled onto related stuff like Bauhaus, De Stijl… All of these things suited my sensibilities, just really sat well with me, the style of their designs. In fact, I decided I wanted to do design as a profession. I was young, so I meant in the future. I just thought it would be cool if I could make stuff like that one day. So I would look at all the books and magazines, exhibitions of that stuff. I happen to like things more hard-edged, “techno” maybe, than those that are curvy or weaving. Once I was an adult I started working in design, and began using Mac’s when they came out around the time I was 30 or so. When I look back at my work, my designs, even from the days before I had a computer, all of them have a bit of a techno touch to them. Once the computers arrived that style became way easier to create, like twice as easy, and I could even use them to make music, so I started making sounds again, since had stopped a ways back.

After you were in Kyoto, at a certain point you went to the US to study. How old were you when you went to the US, whereabouts in the US were you and what kind of musical education did you get while you were there?

It was after I graduated high school and failed my first college entrance exam, when I was a “ronin” [masterless samurai], as they say. As for why I went [to the US], I had always wanted to go there someday. I wouldn’t say I was quite trying to redefine myself, but there was a bit of that, and I thought English would probably be a necessity in the days to come. I was also considering the option of going to an American university if things there went well enough, but in the end I spent too much time just having fun, so that didn’t come to pass. The thing that changed the most for me from going there wasn’t about something influencing me so much as it was about me being on my own for the first time, living by myself for the first time. I spent a week traveling cross-country on a Greyhound bus, from east to west. I went to New York, then went back to California. We didn’t have the internet back then, so I had to set all of this up on my own, buy the tickets and so on, and I talked to the other passengers on the bus, etc… It was more about autonomy for me. Americans are big on plain-speaking. If you can’t say what you want you’ll get cast by the wayside. So I think speaking with all those people from other countries while I was there turned out to be a good experience for me.

It was also my first time going to New York. This was still the ’70s, so the city was still really wild and freewheeling. I was pretty freaked out, especially since it wasn’t like I had a lot of money. Things were really dirty. I’d never seen a city that was so dirty. But overall I found it really stimulating. I went to see live music every day and only thought about eating at the very end. The first place I stayed is now actually a really nice hotel, the Washington Square Hotel in front of Washington Square, as it’s called now. Back then it was the Earle Hotel. The buses went there, and it was kind of the place you’d sneak off to with a lover. The bottom floors weren’t part of the hotel. I stayed there because I had heard from someone in Japan that had been to New York that there was a hotel there. It only cost $11 or so.