ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

A classmate of my grandmother’s was a piano teacher, and my mother, uncle, and I have been learning since we were little. My whole family loved music. My grandmother owned a bar in front of Toride station and used to hold live jazz concerts regularly.

When I was in the third grade of elementary school, my grandmother established a non-profit organization to revitalize the town and started various activities. In the building across the street, there was a group of students from geidai. I often played with them and became more and more involved. That was my first encounter with an art project. From there, I got involved in it, whether I wanted to or not.

Vaguely, I thought I would go to the Tokyo University of the Arts. I decided to go to the Musical Creativity and the Environment Department, which I was told about. I heard that I could learn not only music but also various other things, and I thought it was a good idea. Rather than being on the side of actually creating music, I wanted to be on the side of thinking about where to deliver it and what kind of things would be interesting to incorporate into it.

In my first year, I studied composition, and in my second year, I entered a seminar on media art, and after that, I studied vaporwave, a genre of music created by processing pop music from the 1980s, which is very interesting. It is a musical genre created to digest conflicting feelings toward pop music, which is both a criticism of mass consumption society and nostalgia for it.

I am currently in graduate school doing sociological research on how the vaporwave genre was formed. It is not clear who started vaporwave. Unlike the origins of previous genres, someone on the Internet started to say “this is a music genre,” and it took shape as everyone became aware of it. Including the internet world, there are still very few people doing genre research, and I am trying to deepen my understanding of this.

It is pure curiosity, rather than a desire to make a career out of research. I also like talking about music. Maybe that’s why I keep doing it.

Apart from the research, I am running a company with three of my classmates from the first year of college. As we were talking about what it would be like to find a job in the future, we decided to try out among us. From there, we thought of what the four of us could do together.

I like cameras, the other members can do design, and so on. So now we are starting a production company that focuses on video. I think it would be nice to live with enough money to survive, and at the same time, each of us can continue to do what we want to do, such as research or play in a band.

I do a lot of music videos and other music-related video works. Last week, we went to the Shikoku and Chugoku area to shoot. We did the lighting and direction ourselves. I think our strength is that we can do everything related to sound. I would like to do live-streaming as part of my work from now on, and I am in the process of setting up the environment for it.

Recently, I took photos of my grandparents. That was a lot of fun. Lately, I’ve been enjoying taking pictures of people. I’ve been taking more pictures of local scenery. I wonder why but for me, It doesn’t have to be a dramatic photo, but something that is always there. I guess I am conscious of capturing things that are always there, but only in this moment.

Photography, video, research, and band. What I do is rather different, but I would like to continue to explore how I can continue to do this.