MADEON x YASUTAKA NAKATA (CAPSULE)

The interview he did with Nakata-san while in Japan. The original interview is entirely in Japanese.

Translated text: yesbooze.tumblr.com / MALEFICENTS (Twitter)

Edited, etc by me. Do not repost anywhere. –

the fortunate meeting of Japanese and French electropop artists

The french artist, Madeon. Now 21 years old, started composing music at the age of 11. At 17 he started his career by acting as the producer for Lady GaGa and since then has worked with artist such as Coldplay and Two Door Cinema Club. His debut album, “Adventure”, was released in April this year and in August he came to Japan to perform live in SONIC MANIA and SUMMER SONIC 2015. Here, at Natalie Music, we made it a reality for Madeon to sit down and have a conversation with the person who has influenced him greatly, Yasutaka Nakata from Capsule. Madeon says he has been following Capsule’s work since he heard their album “MORE! MORE! MORE!” by chance when it was released in 2008. Madeon and Nakata came in contact when they worked together for their remix of “Pay No Mind feat. Passion Pit” earlier this year. This was their first real meeting. As fellow creators of electronic music, they had a deep conversation about their thoughts regarding to each other’s music, their attitudes towards their works and even discussed the specifics of the technical side of making music, finding out that, surprisingly, they have a lot in common.

The Meeting and The First Impressions

When did Nakata first hear about Madeon?

Nakata Yasutaka: The last time he was in Japan, a friend of mine told me that Madeon has been talking about my CD in social media. I do not use social media, so I did not see that myself but that was the first time I heard of him.

Madeon: (laughing) I uploaded a lot of Capsule songs on my social media sites and even included them in my DJ sets.

Madeon, what is it about Nakata’s music that fascinates you?



Madeon: The way he arranges chords is very smart and very complicated. But at the same time, there is feeling of creativity in the way the more “pop” parts are made. It makes an impact. Most of western pop music is basically very simple and easy to understand, but when Nakata does it (pop music) it feels a lot more intelligent.

Nakata: That makes me very happy. Madeon’s music is also very different from other foreign artists. How should I put it… he does things with his songs that surprises those who make music themselves, but he still manages to make it easy to listen to.

Madeon: Thank you so much! The music Nakata makes is exactly the same. For an example, the production of Perfume’s “Polyrhythm” has the difficult and complicated rhythm type, polyrhythm, but it still has this pop melody that anyone can enjoy, which makes it amazing. Where did you learn to arrange chords and write melodies like that?

Nakata: I am greatly influenced by video game music. I use a lot of sounds like chiptunes, just like Madeon. Nowadays the music in games has changed but when I was a kid the music was 8-bit and 16-bit and had no vocals. On top of that, they only had a few notes they could use but those few notes created songs that sounded very entertaining. Since I came in contact with music like that when I was a kid, I think it still deeply rooted in me today.

Madeon: Since they only had a few notes to play with, they had no choice but try to create the amazing video game world atmosphere by playing notes one by one. To me, the reason for using 8-bit and 16-bit is the same, I think. Hearing video game music where there’s only a few notes that are played one by one brings up a lot of strong, positive feelings since I used to listen to that kind of music a lot when I was a kid.

Since Madeon does not understand Japanese, he listens to music mainly for the instruments. Does the music you listened to as children act as a big influence for the two of you?

Nakata: Even though I don’t exactly plan to do it, but the ideas that come to me are heavily influenced by my childhood. My parents really enjoy film music. Most people know me from my work that has vocals in it, but before I rarely listened to music with vocals. The base of my music is probably instrumental. Nowadays I mostly make music with vocals so I had to start thinking about the melody first, but originally I was like “I’ll focus on the sound first… and then after that I have to insert vocals” (laugh). Since I became a professional musician, I’ve been thinking if the vocals are really necessary. Fundamentally the music itself is the priority. I think that in Japan especially, there are a lot of people who care less about the music and more about what the vocals are about. I want to make music where the music itself tells the story.

Madeon: On the other hand, I do not understand Japanese, so when I listen to Nakata’s music I listen to it as if the vocals were just one of the instruments. Especially in songs where auto-tune is used, the vocals sounds like a synthesizer so I listen to them as if they were just one part of the composition.

Nakata: That might be similar to how Japanese people feel like when they listen to music in English. They listen to the songs without really understanding the lyrics, so they end up listening to the song mainly for the music itself, I think. Originality comes from working alone It seems like Madeon does almost everything related to his music himself.

Madeon: In the West, there are often multiple people involved in the making of pop music. In many cases there are five people writing the lyrics, five people composing the music and five people doing the producing. But I think that since both me and Nakata do everything mostly ourselves, we both are able to include original world views in our music.

Nakata: When I first got serious about making music, I asked professionals to work on things like sound making and the arrangement and the songs ended up being very high quality, but somehow they did not sound exactly like I imagined they would. To me being able to put what is in my head into my work is even more important than the quality of said work.

Madeon: When a lot of people are involved in the music, it’s safer. There’s no risk. In other words, it becomes less original..

Nakata: Exactly. When I made my debut album, it’s not like I did everything by myself either - the recording work was divided between different people. Which is why even when I was working on my own and had a clear vision of how much of certains sounds I wanted in a song, they turned out different because other people got involved. I was thinking things like “this is now how it was meant to sound like” (laugh). Working with multiple people makes the songs well prepared and they became “just right” but I wanted to do more. I really wanted to do more but I couldn’t because everyone was telling me not to over-do it (laugh).

Establishing a time limit creates perfection

When you make music by yourself, it seems like it’s hard to stop and say “okay it’s done now”.

Nakata: If it was up to me, my work would be never finished. That is why I let other people give me a limit like “you have until this day to work on that song”.

Madeon: Yeah. I have this thing I do every year. I challenge myself to create 3 songs from start to finish in 24 hours. When I do that, I’m able to come up with songs my usual self could never even think of. When you establish a deadline, all your creative power comes out during that time and you discover new things.

Nakata: If you don’t have a deadline, you can keep remixing the song and it feels like it’s never going to be finished (laugh). Madeon: Also if you do that, the song will end up becoming something completely different from what it was intended to be (laugh).

Nakata: For a musician, it’s hard to decide when something is finished. That’s why it’s good to have a limited time that forces you to make that decision.

Madeon: When I was making my album, I kept pushing the deadline further and further and in the end the album was ready extremely late. I was also touring all over the world at the time, so the album production had to be put on hold constantly. But I kept promising myself to finish at least one song before going on a tour again so there would not be incomplete projects lying around risking never to be finished. But it is indeed very hard to stop and say that “okay this is done now”.

About their individual sounds

What are the similarities and differences in your music?

Nakata: We just talked about how Western pop music is very simple, but in Madeon’s tracks there are painful, sad feelings present in the music itself. When I’m making music, I want it to be emotional and have a lot of feeling and I think that is what we have in common. I like that kind of music. But while Madeon arranges his song very carefully, they are not always calm and collected. There are impulsive parts in his songs as well and those parts give so much feeling. It’s almost explosive (laugh). I understand wanting to write calm, collected songs but also wanting to do something a bit more impulsive with them.

Madeon: Yeah, I definitely do that (laugh). When I listen to Nakata’s music, it is very clear to me that he understand musical theory well. But in my case, I often have parts in my songs that go into a completely different direction than the rest and I like keeping those parts there. What I find very interesting in Nakata’s is the amazing contrast and balance between extremely loud, sound-filled parts and the very quiet, silent parts.

Nakata: Yes, the so called “plugging and unplugging”. But aren’t you the one who’s better at that?

Madeon: No no, that’s not true at all.

Madeon’s thoughts on Yasutaka’s remix

Nakata worked on Madeon’s “Pay No Mind feat. Passion Pit” remix and it ended up being quite different from the original one. When you were working on the remix, what things were you focusing on?

Nakata: Before I go into that, there is one thing I’d like to ask from Madeon. In your original version, there are chords go to rather unusual directions. Did you plan to do that from the start? Or did you change them when you started working on the melody?

Madeon: I’m going to write it down on paper as I explain. Originally I wrote the chords like this (writing on paper) but in the remix Nakata made the chord progression is a bit strange… To be honest, when I heard his remix I was like “I should have done that too” (laugh). The reason I ended up making the chords go to an unusual direction is because in my album I already had two songs that included the same chords and I wanted to avoid repetition so I changed them. But when I heard Nakata’s version I thought that it fit the melody of the vocals a lot better.

Nakata: Hahaha.

Madeon: I think that’s the fun part of having your songs remixed though. Because the person doing the remixing can forget the original song for a bit and just think about what they would do with it if it was theirs. So when I listen to Nakata’s remix it’s like “Ah, I see” because I can understand what he was aiming for.

Nakata: I had fun remixing it too. The original version had a melody that was easy to remix. It also had a lot of parts where you could switch the movement of the chords so it was very easy to work with. Madeon, did Nakata’s remix fill your expectations? Or was it a happy mistake?

Madeon: It turned out exactly like I hoped it would. It had that Nakata Yasutaka feeling in it. Especially one part where the chords move in a way that makes absolutely no sense. I listened to that part over and over again. That’s how much I loved it. I like it when a song makes me want to listen to it over and over again, so I was very happy with how the remix turned out.

Nakata: When I’m working on my own songs I think like “with a melody like this the chord progression is usually something like this” and then make the vocalist sing along the chords I decided on. Then I only have the melody left to work on and I can think carefully what to do with it. I do that a lot. That’s why I always feel like I’m making a remix.

Madeon: Ooh, that’s a smart way to do it. You can play with small details later.

Nakata: In my work, I record the vocals quite early. First I record the raw version and then work on the sound later. I decide the chords for the hook later like “that part is pretty good, but so is that” and it’s kinda hard to decide and sometimes I end up adding completely different chords for it. The songs I make for Kyary (Pamyu Pamyu) are usually made like this.

Madeon: In songs like “JUMPER” (a song from Capsule’s album) the vocals turn into autotune in the middle of the song.

Nakata: When we made that album it felt like I was playing the vocals for it. It got to the point where I could no longer remember what kind of melody Toshiko (Capsule’s vocalist) was originally singing. I recorded her vocals in the simplest form first almost like I was recording on a sampler and decided what to do with them after.

The concept of a lovingly created album

Madeon, you use mostly male vocalists. Is there a reason for that?

Madeon: There certainly are more male vocals on the album. I barely use female vocalists. There is no specific reason for that, but I guess it might have something to do with how I love Daft Punk and they have never used female vocals on their tracks. Also I think it’s interesting to use low male vocals in songs that are upbeat and happy.

Nakata: When I listen to Madeon’s album, I get the feeling that it was arranged with the “This is going to be an album!” mentality instead of thinking of each song as an individual.

Madeon: Ah yeah, that’s right! I made a plan for the entire album. I wanted the songs to be connected to each other which is why I was very careful with the song arrangement on the album.

Nakata: I’m the same, thinking that this song would be good here, and that sound would be good there. I also want the songs in the beginning and the end of the album to be connected to each other as intro and outro. Do you do that too?

Madeon: Yeah, I did that. I also had songs that I thought were be very good but they didn’t fit anywhere in the album so I ended up not putting them on it. Just like Nakata, I too want my album to flow nicely. Every song has its place. The last thing I do is to pick an appropriate song to be the last song on the album. Putting an album together is fun work and I want to create something that you would want to listen to very carefully. When it comes to electronic music, albums like that are rare. Mostly people see the songs as individuals and pick 2 to 3 songs they listen to.

Nakata: That’s right. Nowadays it seems like everyone thinks like “That one song is so good!”. Almost no one is interested in listening to albums as a whole. It’s like the meaning of an album is disappearing. I can sympathise with Madeon about wanting to make music that is made to be listened to in the form of an album. To me it was a bit surprising that even though the two of you making electronic music, you still see the concept of “an album” as something sacred.

Madeon: When time goes on and the current era of music becomes more of a thing in the past, I hope that the people in that future can look back into this time period when they listen to my album. Also, I want to leave something behind in the form of an album, so I too can at some point look back in time. In order to fully capture myself as I currently am for the past me to reflect on, I’m going to need the space of an entire album.

Nakata: That’s right, in order to capture everything that’s inside you, every interest you have, and to be able to look at your past self in different angles, you are going to have write multiple songs. When you do that, the album becomes almost like a soundtrack, I think. Madeon, your album is like this too, but when I put a short intro song in the beginning of the album, in someway it feels like I’m making a soundtrack, even though there is no movie to go with it.

Madeon: That is true. I think that is how I feel too when I’m making music.

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