INDEX
Getting Closer to Music Before It’s Something You Sell
There are many ways to describe it: a lie, entertainment, a dream, a story. When it comes to sharing something to “sell” music, which can’t truly be sold, what do you keep in mind?
Gomi: For us, it’s about scale and closeness. You could call it “being able to see the faces” or “being within reach.” It’s a distance where both sides can understand each other — like, “this isn’t working” or “this is art.”
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with filling a dome with tens of thousands of people, selling tens of thousands of CDs, or racking up hundreds of millions of streams. But if you can’t see anyone, if all you have are numbers to measure people, it becomes really hard to share values.
That sense of scale and closeness itself upholds LOSTAGE and its music.
Gomi: I feel that if you can share values at the right distance, even when money is involved, you can still understand each other. For me, that exchange of feeling, that communicative aspect, is what matters most.
I think there was something before it was even called music — a feeling of “This is where I am” or “This is what I feel,” with melody and rhythm simply attached. There’s a sense of wanting to get back to that state, before music became a product. Even if there’s a contradiction in selling it, I don’t want to forget that music was originally like that. I want to stay oriented toward that feeling.
When we started the band, it was the same—more communication than ambition, more play than business. We’d look for friends in the same grade who could play instruments, talk about the music we loved, rent a studio with pocket money. That hasn’t changed. LOSTAGE still exists in that spirit, like gathering on weekends to play mahjong. It started as communication, and somehow, by luck, it’s become something people can listen to—a small creation born from that exchange.
