Name: Bajune Tobeta
Nationality: Japanese
Occupation: Composer, producer, pianist, sound artist, researcher
Current release: Bajune Tobeta's new Anechoic EP, mastered by Denis Blackham, featuring Christian Fennesz and including a remix by AOKI takamasa, is out via CROIX Co., Ltd. / electric sheep. Also available is a full-length album tribute to Sergio Mendes, recorded with Gracinha Leporace,  Saigenji and Febian Reza Pane.

[Read our Denis Blackham interview]
[Read our Denis Blackham interview about mastering Kraftwerk, Mike Oldfield and Vangelis]
[Read our Denis Blackham interview about his Life in Mastering]

If you enjoyed this Bajune Tobeta interview and would like to know more about his music and projects, visit his official homepage. He is also on bandcamp.



Anechoic, was inspired by Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. What personally and creatively interested you about the novel?

Two worlds flow through that novel in alternation: a Tokyo overflowing with information and noise, and a quiet town surrounded by a high wall.

Rereading it, I realized it is not a story about two places. It is a story about the inside of one person. All of us live in the noisy world while carrying, at the same time, a silent town behind a wall.

The sensation of entering an anechoic chamber is astonishingly close to that town inside the wall. The sounds of the world disappear, and only your interior remains. When I reread the novel as an acoustic experience, the blueprint of this album appeared.

The way literature and music deal with narrative can be very different. Can you reflect on that a bit and what role the storyline of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World concretely played while you were working on the pieces?

When people set a novel to music, most of them chase the story. I did the opposite: I discarded the story and borrowed only the structure. The essence of that book is not its plot but its breathing, the rhythm by which two worlds alternate, noise and stillness, outside and inside, exchanging places chapter by chapter.

On the album I translated that rhythm into the density of sound and the distribution of silence. Literature describes a place in words; music can build the place itself. The listener does not read the story, the listener comes to live inside the wall. That is a translation only music can perform.

Satie gets mentioned in the press release. When did his music enter your life and what would you say did you, or did artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto, whom you studied with, find so powerful about his work?

Satie entered my life when I was a boy taking piano lessons.

Through junior high and high school, the composers I kept returning to were Satie, Chopin, and Debussy. Looking back, I was always choosing the ones who used the piano to paint not sound itself but its afterglow, its presence, its interior. I think I already sensed, before I had words for it, that music is what remains in the room after your hands leave the keys.

Satie's great strength was that he gave music the freedom not to be listened to. The furniture music he proposed in the 1920s was a declaration: music does not need to monopolize our attention, it may simply be part of the air of a room. In an era when everyone competed over how to make people listen, he alone was imagining music that could exist without being heard.

That is not modesty. It is the most radical confidence there is: the conviction that music can become space itself. Sakamoto, too, was one of the rare composers who could treat sound as environment before treating it as work. A century apart, the two of them were living inside the same question.

Can you tell me a bit about your studies with Ryuichi Sakamoto and what you still take from them for your current work?

There is a phrase of Sakamoto's I still recall almost daily: to make good music, keep listening to good music. It sounds simple, but it was not advice about technique. It was an instruction about how to live, a declaration of order: making is only ever the result of listening.

He also insisted that a piece of music does not end at its own completion; a composer has to think about how it will be heard and how it will travel through society. What mattered most was not writing music that is easy to listen to, but music that proposes a way of listening, music that can, at times, change how we listen altogether. Not only what you make, but how you make people hear: that, too, is composition.

Anechoic is my attempt to practice that teaching. I was not just writing five pieces, I was trying to design a way of listening that moves toward stillness.

For outsiders, Sakamoto's rich oeuvre can sometimes seem confusingly diverse. What, from your point of view, was the core of his music, what made his compositions truly groundbreaking and unique?

From the outside his work can look scattered; from the inside it was utterly consistent. He did not believe in genres, he believed in sound. YMO, the film scores, async: to him they were all one and the same act, the endless repetition of a single question. Does this sound truly need to be here?

What made him groundbreaking is that he never let go of that question. On async, late in his life, he placed the sounds of objects, rain, noise, decaying resonance ahead of melody. That was not an experiment. It was a homecoming: a composer returning to sound before it becomes music.

If I was able to walk toward the theme of the anechoic chamber at all, it is because I watched that homecoming from up close.

Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please. What do you still remember as important moments in the realisation phase?

The starting point was to take the novel's double structure I spoke of earlier and actually build it as a room made of sound. Is the anechoic chamber not the acoustic form of that walled town? When every external sound is stripped away, what appears is not emptiness but what had been sounding inside you all along.

The five pieces of Anechoic are arranged as a single journey, from entering that room to leaving it. The first piece, “Anechoic,” is the doorway. Strings, orchestral writing, and electronics coexist in a state of tension and dialogue.



Here I treated dissonance and silence itself as materials with the same standing as melody. It is not a piece for comfort; it is a piece for changing the sensitivity of the ear.

The second, “Memories”: in a room where the outside has gone quiet, the first thing to surface is memory.



The third, “After the Silence,” is the center of the album, a collaboration with Christian Fennesz. Both of us had been deeply involved in Ryuichi Sakamoto's work, yet we had never once recorded together.

I sent him a quiet piano sketch played in Tokyo, almost as a question, and weeks later it returned wearing layers of electronics I could never have imagined, as if the silence inside my playing had become a space he had moved into.



The title, “After the Silence,” is also an urgent question for the two of us: after the great silence Sakamoto left behind, what will rise?

The fourth is AOKI takamasa's reconstruction of my piano performance of Gymnopedie.

And the fifth, “Satie's Dream,” is my own answer to Satie. His hundred-year-old dream of music that demands no attention, music that is simply there like the air of a room, connects quietly to the thought of the anechoic chamber.



With this piece the album opens the door of the room and steps outside.

And I cannot forget the mastering. Denis Blackham, whom I met on Fennesz's recommendation, polished the album not as a collection of tracks but as one continuous flow. He designed even the few seconds of nothing that remain after the final decay. Those seconds are the album's last instrument.

The title to the stunningly beautiful “Memories” points to the power of sound to evoke sensations of nostalgia. Can you talk a bit about how the piece got made and why sound may be so particularly strong at evoking memories?

“Memories” was in fact born before the album. Some years ago I built it from layered textures and fragments, almost entirely on intuition, the way you might assemble images you only half remember. At the time I did not know precisely what I had made.

It was only while conceiving Anechoic that I understood, belatedly, what the piece had been about from the beginning. In a room where the outside has gone quiet, the first thing to surface is memory. Not the kind you summon, but the kind that rises on its own out of the stillness.

If sound is so powerful at evoking memory, I think it is because sound is the only art that preserves duration. A photograph preserves an instant; sound preserves time itself. And memory, too, remains in the body not as instants but as durations.

That is why the decay of a single chord can carry an entire stretch of time back to you, smell and temperature included.

Music and the accompanying artwork are often closely related. Can you talk about this a little bit for your current project and the relationship that images and sounds have for you in general?

Whenever I try to describe Anechoic, what comes to mind is a museum with few visitors: the hushed air of the moment you step into an empty gallery.

It is close to Murakami's prose in that way. Quiet, but not silent. Your own footsteps, the low hum of the air conditioning, the presence of distant rooms. And strangely, it is precisely in that stillness that a single painting begins to draw near.

The painting hanging on that wall: that, to me, is the artwork of this album. A cover is not an explanation of the music but the entrance to the room where the music will be heard. I want the image to carry not an answer but a pressure, to convey only the amount of light and the density of the air in the place where this music is sounding, and otherwise to remain silent.