Interview with Seijiro Murayama (M) 2023-2025
This interview, conducted in French by Michel Henritzi (H) in the form of a letter, was published in the French experimental music magazine "Revue et Corrigée" in December 2025. The piece is titled "Seijiro Murayama, the Music to Come."
H: Can you talk about your musical journey, your beginnings, your first groups, and the years leading up to the present?
M: As a child, I practiced painting and Japanese calligraphy. Music did not attract me because of some bad experiences I had at school. Without ever thinking of playing music, I began listening to it, and later I enjoyed improvising by myself.
After a few musical encounters in Tokyo, I took part in Fushitsusha (1982). Later, I played in a trio called Absolute Null Punkt.
Collaborators: Jean-Luc Guionnet, Eric La Casa, Axel Dörner, Attila Gyárfás, Cyprien Busolini, Hervé Boghossian, Klaus Filip...
I have just formed a collective called Skew with musicians and performers from the younger generation, including Hugo Abraham, Victor Guaita and Cyprien Busolini...
We performed in Paris and Brussels in 2023.
H: What was your musical training?
M: One year of drums and cello, followed by a few years of alto saxophone.
H: In traditional Japanese culture, it is important to follow the teaching of a master and to reproduce the forms of his teaching before being able to assert one's own voice. Does this still make sense to you and to younger generations in Japan today?
M: Yes. This tradition was rediscovered this year in the world of shōgi, or Japanese chess, thanks to the unprecedented achievement of the player Sōta Fujii, who was 21 in 2023. For someone who is constantly searching for absolute beauty, it is no longer a matter of winning or losing. Even though Fujii uses artificial intelligence in his research, he respects all kinds of traditional codes and virtues of shōgi. For me, this represents a rebirth of a tradition that had seemed already frozen to me.
H: What do traditional musics represent for your generation?
M: I have the impression that my generation, which benefited greatly from the economic success of 1955–73 without having contributed to it, was much more interested in Western music—as a sign of security, progress and comfort—without thinking either about our past or about our identity. There was no place for traditional music in our interest in culture.
H: In particular, concepts such as ma, jo-ha-kyū... And beyond these concepts, are there elements of traditional music that you take up in your own work?
M: No. Even though I love Noh, it is unthinkable for me to take traditional elements and apply them directly to my work. Indirectly, however, yes.
I am looking for a kind of spirituality.
H: Do you think that mixing tradition and modernity can open up something important, or at least something new—perhaps a way of connecting the past to ourselves?
M: It seems to me that a mixture of French tradition and French modernity would be imaginable because of the historical continuity between the two—since the nineteenth century, perhaps—whereas I find it difficult to imagine a similar mixture in relation to Japanese culture because of our history of Westernization.
H: I would make an exception for the conceptual level: texts by Zeami and Musashi are still illuminating today and can be applied to our contemporary work.
M: There is a postwar jazz tradition in Japan that has had a great impact on modern and popular Japanese music. In general, it went through three stages: first, copying and imitation; then some rather unproductive stages; and finally, creative originality toward the end of the 1990s.
The contemporary pop music of Toko Furuuchi—rather from the end of the last century—really attracts me in this respect, as a successful mixture, although her music is perhaps too subtle, or too ordinary, to be appreciated by my Western friends. Her Japanese fans are mainly attracted by stories of lost or complicated love, and precisely that is our immutable poetic tradition.
H: In an interview with Jean-Luc Guionnet, you describe yourself as an animist. How does this translate into your relationship with the instrument? What relationship is there between Shinto and music?
M: Yes, I am quite animistic, but not at all Shintoist, like most non-practicing Japanese people—not Shinto, Buddhist, Christian, and so on.
Mallarmé seemed to have a similar attitude toward literature. One could become an animist through one's own desire to be less egocentric, to be more open not only toward other human beings but also toward other things.
It is simply a matter of putting oneself in the place of the other with whom one is interacting, and trying to imagine what one feels at that moment, whether as a human being or as a thing.
An instrument is designed as a musical tool whose main function is to reproduce one sound or another in a stable and precise way, according to the wishes of the musician who manipulates it.
For example, a cymbal. I play a cymbal—the bottom cymbal of a pair of hi-hats—with a special bow made by a Parisian instrument maker. The technique itself is nothing special. But I use it while holding the cymbal in my left hand, without using the cymbal stand or pedal. In this way, I manipulate the movements of the cymbal, either in the air or on the head of the snare drum, which acts as a resonating body, in a dynamic or even chaotic way in order to obtain various frequencies.
Today I have more or less mastered this improvised manipulation, but not completely, which gives me a reason to want to improvise even more.
In this manipulation, there is a complex question of touching and being touched: between two objects; between a human body and an object; between two frequencies that interfere with one another; between two vibrations, and so on.
I improvise with all this by creating a kind of osmosis between two actions:
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Feeling and capturing things very quickly and meticulously, constantly shifting my listening and my gaze.
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Organizing, or improvising, the movements of my body intuitively.
That is an approximate analysis of what I do during an improvisation with a cymbal and a bow, but in reality my approach is different: I concentrate on other factors or parameters, and ultimately it is the sound that resolves everything.
So, if I cannot bring out a sound that “works” for me, all I can do is accept a state of misery. But I am not yet bold enough to accept it.
I hope I have managed to give the image of a Sunday animist.
To conclude, I will quote a text that I wrote for my lecture at Instants Chavirés on May 7, 2019, as part of REFLEXIO, directed by Matthieu Saladin, lecturer at Paris 8:
In order to question the triangular configuration between the improviser, the instrument and the sound within a broader perspective of the improvisational situation, I would briefly suggest the following:
Each of the three elements becomes a medium.
Each pair among the three elements creates feedback between them.
I would say that this triangular relationship comes from my strongly animistic personal experiences.
H: What was your musical environment like during your childhood?
M: Almost nothing outside the national education system.
I hated music.
H: Do jazz and free jazz speak to you?
M: Yes. For example, my idea of maintaining a pulse in improvisation comes from free jazz.
I am still influenced by Steve Lacy, Sunny Murray, Mark Ratledge, Alan Davies and Tony Oxley, Kaoru Abe, Derek Bailey...
But I am not interested in playing jazz or free jazz in public. They are only sources of inspiration for me.
There has been a very strong history of these musics in Japan since the postwar period, with artists who moved away from the historical African-American figures, such as Masahiko Togashi, Motoharu Yoshizawa, Sabu Toyozumi, Kaoru Abe...
I have the impression that this history is not particularly linked to Japan, and that almost the same history took place in Europe. One can see a transition from jazz—through free jazz—to improvisation as a search for identity, or even for non-identity.
It is striking that jazz still occupies such a place in Japan today. You hear it in many restaurants and shops...
As background music. Thanks to capitalism, globalization and consumer society.
H: Did you frequent jazz kissa?
M: A little. I remember a café that allowed us to listen not only to jazz but also to Western experimental music.
H: How did you discover improvisation? What did you feel when confronted with the freedom of playing that it made possible? What does improvisation represent for you? Does it make sense, in your view, to oppose it to composition?
M: After the decisive discovery of improvisation, when I watched a concert by Vinko Globokar on television, I began practicing it as a hobby, with the desire to create something by myself and, perhaps excessively, to protect myself from Japanese society.
I do not think about improvisation either in relation to the question of freedom or in comparison with composition.
For me, improvisation is everywhere and at every moment in our daily lives. It stimulates, intensifies and renews human language. It is one of the essential factors of life.
But we generally practice it unconsciously. That is why it is difficult to practice it within one artistic context or another.
H: You play in many different contexts. How do you approach these different collaborations? On what basis do they take shape?
M: What generally interests me is working on collaborations that seem to me to be good projects but that do not work immediately.
In addition, the ideal is to begin a collaboration without setting a precise objective.
H: I hear an echo of music associated with Onkyo in your recent music. Have the musicians connected with this movement influenced you, or at least made you think about your music differently? What, in your view, defines the Onkyo approach?
M: Because of the difficulty of finding inexpensive concert venues for experimental music in Tokyo, some organizers began using spaces that were not entirely dedicated to music, where a volume level acceptable to the neighborhood was required.
This condition forced musicians to play in cramped spaces and the audience to remain completely, or almost completely, silent. Eventually, everyone became accustomed to it.
This phenomenon changed not only the conventional concert setting but also the music itself. For me, this is one of the important aspects of Onkyo: searching for a more appropriate space in which to present improvisation in public, rather than relying on the overly obvious concert framework—the musicians facing the audience, the provider facing the receiver.
The collapse of the Japanese financial bubble around 1991 marked the end of a national orgy: a transition from energy to quietness. The arrival of a new generation of musicians—very often eccentric—had an unprecedented impact, especially at the conceptual level, on Japanese experimental music.
The status of the improvising musician changed radically: from a deliberate emitter of sound to an attentive receiver of sound, whose working process consists in relying on listening to trigger the next sound.
It seems to me that many Japanese musicians have a particular relationship with silence, which would not simply be an absence of sound but a constituent element of music, more than just a breathing space. What about you?
I work on the threshold between a sound that “still holds together” and one that is “a little too much,” and between the time when I make sound and the time when I do not make sound.
When I play, I do not think about silence.
Besides, silence does not physically exist. “Silence, please” is a remark made within a social context. There is another kind of silence, with an ontological or existential nuance, that interests me. I connect Levinas's "il y a" to this other silence.
H: You have produced solo percussion albums and you give many solo concerts. Why this choice? What does playing alone imply for you?
M: Presenting something solo in public is important to me because it is a confrontation not only with the audience but above all with myself.
It is like giving one's own opinion in a public discussion, with strong motivation, choosing the right words, taking one's time, sometimes allowing oneself to get lost and bringing in moments of silence.
H: What memories do you retain from your experiences in rock—ANP, Fushitsusha...? What did they bring you?
M: Haino claims the term Hard Rock in order to give it an almost spiritual rather than musical meaning. According to him, the word “hard” signifies an unrelenting challenge on the mental, physical and intellectual levels. This is still useful to me today, although I do it differently, in a more static way.
Yes, those experiences were physically and mentally extreme.
H: How did you move from this extreme approach to drumming toward a minimalist percussive approach?
M: The drum kit is an invention that was historically developed to meet the needs of the music of a particular era. It was mainly designed to accompany other musicians rhythmically.
It is also a modifiable assembly of percussion instruments.
Today, there is nothing particularly unusual about a drummer changing or omitting elements of the drum kit. However, this kind of approach does not touch the essence of the drum kit at all: its rhythmic role. Or rather, those who like to play rhythmically need a drum kit—that is all.
Ultimately, it is an instrument of a classical nature, intended for music in which musical language—especially rhythmic language—dominates, and which is learned through a process of working “from sameness toward difference.” This is not the case with improvisation, whose work proceeds “from difference toward sameness,” in a more fragile and sound-based manner.
So theoretically, I have no reason to choose a drum kit.
For quite a long time, I have been working on the snare drum microscopically and introspectively: bringing out multiple sounds by working with a single instrument. This is not entirely true, because one needs sticks, brushes and so on in order to play the snare drum. And, on top of that, doing it through improvisation.
This is what lies at the basis of my work. It was the style I began developing around 2005.
At present, I am returning to the drum kit—only with a bass drum, a snare drum and a hi-hat—with the desire to play non-rhythmically and sometimes rhythmically.
H: How do you see noise music today, in Japan and beyond?
M: In general, I do not know noise music very well.
H: You played with Keiji Haino. How did you experience that, particularly his relationship to sound and to intense volume levels?
M: It was a good discovery for me, as I had been doing acoustic improvisation.
H: Haino presents himself as a shaman. Do you experience him that way?
M: No. I learned a great deal from him in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and afterward it took me quite a long time to free myself from his influence.
H: You also improvise quite frequently with Western musicians. Do you feel a different relationship to the stage, and especially to the ego, between them and yourself? Also, regarding the musical experience, my own experience is that in Japan it is less focused on a result than on a process.
M: I mostly play with colleagues with whom I have worked for a long time. Every improviser I have met is different, and so everything is fine.
Most improvisers in Japan are so busy that they do not have enough time to work on improvisation. That is something I experienced myself.
H: You said in the interview mentioned earlier that modern Japanese music is Western. That is quite a provocative statement, isn't it?
M: Yes, perhaps.
I simply wanted to talk about what seems to me to be the constitutive basis of Japanese music over the last 150 years.
The Japanese particularity is that we do nothing on our own. We have nothing.
Our specialty is to import products created elsewhere, refine them, and export them.
Japan was forced to invent a strategy against Western powers in the nineteenth century: to copy and sophisticate practical and useful Western things, and to use them against the West. The same approach exists in relation to music. Certainly, some musicians claim their Japanese cultural identity.
H: Free musicians in Japan, like those connected with Fluxus, on the contrary wanted to escape this influence. Can you develop your thinking?
M: I have the impression that they wanted to preserve their cultural identity, as in the case of Butoh dance.
H: What music do you listen to today?
M: No particular music.
H: Do you also find inspiration in other art forms or in literature?
M: Certainly.
H: Could you give some examples of these relationships?
M: Here are a few examples that, it seems to me, are not sufficiently well known:
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Greg Bright: maze maker, musician
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Shūzō Kuki: philosopher; The Structure of Iki; The Problem of Contingency
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Starfuckers: Italian group from Bologna
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Édouard Levé: artist, writer
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Giovanni Lindo Ferretti: singer, writer
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Watazumi Dōsō: shakuhachi player
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Jim French: saxophonist
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Jazz Bois: Hungarian group
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Jamie Muir, John French, Stu Martin, Sunny Murray, Yasuo Sano, Nobuo Eguchi: percussionists or drummers
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Kyūsaku Yumeno: writer of Dogura Magura
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Werner Schroeter: director of Eika Katappa
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John Cassavetes: director of Opening Night
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H: You seem to me more of a percussionist than a drummer; that is to say, your music seems more subordinated to rhythm than to sound. What does rhythm represent for you?
M: The idea of separating rhythm and sound does not seem correct to me.
The purpose of my work on rhythm is to find paths toward improvisation. Using rhythm in improvisation is not my first choice.
Pulse interests me, and it is the basis of my improvisational practice.
By nature, I feel more like a drummer than a percussionist: using my legs and feet is beneficial to my current health. The ability to produce sound and the ability to remain physically, mentally and intellectually healthy are closely connected—and even economically healthy... shit!
Identifiable rhythm is a kind of idiom. For me, it is only a tool for learning music.
H: You choose to play only one element, the snare drum. Why this choice?
M: I spoke about this above. At present, when I improvise in public, I use a few elements of the drum kit, sound software, and my voice.
H: You say that you start from sound as a path toward music. This goes against Cage's thinking, in which sound, noise and silence are already music.
M: I am looking for a music to come; therefore, I improvise.
I am speaking about an attitude: shooting at the moon with a slingshot.
H: Why does silence interest you, when it could be understood as absence?
M: In the past, I used the word “silence” to talk about my sonic research, but not so much anymore.
In improvisation, I try intuitively to create a balance between the time when I make sound and the time when I do not make sound. I try not to be seduced by the comfort provided by continuity, and therefore to take the risk of sudden death.
I do not know what to say about the question of presence and absence in relation to silence.
Otherwise, I would say that, in general, there is too much work on sonic presence in improvisation, and not enough on sonic absence, because we lack the intention to share space and time within an improvisational situation, particularly a collective one.