INDEX
Minimalism Informed by Ras G and Madlib
At the same time, tracks like “Galaxy” lean more toward beat music—almost like sharp-edged instrumental hip-hop—and bring in colors that feel different from the ambient side of the album. Where did those elements come from?
Okada: In a very simple sense, I just fell completely in love with that kind of music. I was listening intensely to people like Ras G and Madlib. That’s actually why I reached out to Yakenohara—I really wanted to talk about that music with him.
At the same time, I see that kind of music as carrying a strong Afrocentric lineage, so just like with blues, I didn’t feel I could simply imitate it outright. If anything, listening so deeply to artists like Ras G made me rethink, once again and very seriously, the sense of otherness inherent in blues.
So when it came to absorbing the influence of beat music in my own way, even though it doesn’t have the same surface-level stillness as ambient music, I still wanted to approach it through a minimalist way of thinking.
Over the past decade or so, there’s also been a major reevaluation of J Dilla. Were you following that movement at the time?
Okada: I actually did the opposite—I barely listened to it back then [laughs]. My interest in Ras G didn’t really come from that broader reevaluation of instrumental hip-hop. It started from a completely different thought: wouldn’t it be amazing if just the intro of a Pharoah Sanders track kept looping forever? Then it clicked — wait, isn’t that exactly what Ras G’s beats are doing?
As someone who loves records, another big factor was that I could really feel the cultural appeal of how musical legacies from the past are carried forward in this way.
So the accumulation of very material operations, sampling and editing, can paradoxically bring something like an aura back into being?
Okada: I think that’s something that can happen, yes.
You had already been working with edit-based composition on “Betsu No Jikan,” drawing inspiration from Teo Macero’s techniques on Miles Davis’s recordings. Did that experience naturally lead you to a deeper interest in sampling music?
Okada: I think it did, to a certain extent. On “Betsu No Jikan,” I was already taking performances recorded for one track, cutting them up, transforming them, and reusing them elsewhere — approaches that are very close to sampling.
But when I went back and really listened carefully to J Dilla, what struck me was how he pulls samples from places you’d never expect. And more than that, the way he uses them is completely non-formulaic. The music feels alive. Even though it’s built from edited samples, the sounds don’t exist as isolated points—they’re perceived as a flow. Materially, it’s a collection of points, but between those points there’s a dense, palpable atmosphere. Since I hadn’t listened that closely before, it all felt incredibly fresh to me.
This album also features musicians active in the jazz world, like Shun Ishiwaka on drums, Kei Matsumaru on saxophone, and Marty Holoubek on bass. Yet none of them were recorded together; each part was tracked separately. Just listening to the album, that’s almost impossible to believe. Why did you choose to work that way?
Okada: Looking back over my career, I’ve always felt that my music doesn’t fit neatly into any single framework. It has always hovered somewhere in between. This time, I wanted to acknowledge that consciously and reflect it in the method itself. I didn’t want to commit fully to collective improvisation, but I also didn’t want everything to be completed entirely inside a computer. I was interested in working within that in-between space.
That sense of in-betweenness applies culturally as well. I can’t fully commit to Black music, but I can’t fully commit to Japanese traditional culture either. And in terms of finish or polish, I deliberately avoided aiming for something completely sealed or perfect, leaving room for that same sense of ambiguity.
