There’s no need for a shortcut to the honest feeling of wanting to create music. If you’re being controlled, you’ll want to escape. A shift in mood to music made for oneself, not anyone else: that sentiment is a return to the days when he immersed himself in his art. Music production isn’t merely an option for enjoying life. For Nakata Yasutaka, continuing to make music as CAPSULE is a home where he can rest. There’s only a short time left until CAPS LOCK, their first release since their label transfer to Warner Music, will be complete.
On a computer keyboard, there’s a key known as “caps lock.” Maybe you know that this key, which allows one to switch between upper and lowercase English letters, has actually long been the target of criticism from those who dispute that meaning of its existence. From a practical point of view, this “caps lock,” gone so far as to have caused an abolition movement beneath the surface, has been laid out as the title of CAPSULE’s latest work. Of course, it’s for a just cause that their unit’s uppercase writing has associated them to this title, but at the core of that concept, for this duo who has continued to create so many epoch-like works over the years, could there be a hidden theme to this album questioning the raison d’être of the modern generation? Setting this overly deep reading out on the table, we faced the interview.
How are you progressing on the album? As far as the deadline goes, I really need to hurry up and get to work on it, but... I still don’t feel like it yet (laughs).
(laughs) Do you have a clear vision of your goal? CAPSULE is where I make music at a free pace. It isn’t music I make on request, and there’s other work I’m doing that I only create according to someone else’s timing — how should I put it… CAPSULE is my personal music work, so it’s not something I started to please others; it’s just something I create because it’s fun to do. Being hurried to write movie themes or tracks for other artists’ use doesn’t tire me. But when I make music for myself, it comes from a completely different channel. It’s something I’ve been doing since before I became a professional, so ultimately, in that sense, I’m always thinking I want to do music “made at a free pace.”
Incidentally, when do you feel within yourself that a composition is complete? In the end, it’s always when I’ve reached my deadline (laughs). I didn’t start CAPSULE with the intention of it being a performance unit, so part of my work in that realm is also simply making tracks in my studio and then being done with it. On the contrary, the artists I produce all work within the public eye as entertainers, but that’s not what CAPSULE is. I really think there should be a place for music that’s created and just left at that. To put it another way, I don’t have any problem with the music itself not taking the main focus.
Nonetheless, at present, live-oriented artists are the mainstream. You could say that. Something I think often lately is that music is quickly becoming just one element of a more generalized sphere of entertainment. I’ve never had much interest in performing live — for me, making music is more like painting a picture. To me, live performances are very much like a restless painter being forced to let everyone watch while he paints.
Hahaha. So I consider my studio to be like a painter’s atelier. Once I’ve produced the work, it’s finished. For that reason, when I wind up doing live shows, I start to feel like, “But it’s already done!”
Do you remember exactly when you started to feel that sense of discomfort? Maybe when I began to take on work outside of CAPSULE and realized that you can’t lump entertainment and musicians together. Even if you’re not familiar with Perfume and Kyary [Pamyu Pamyu]’s concerts or music, they both come up with schemes and tricks to make you think, “That looks interesting.” People who have been there before will get what I mean, but it’s the same as not having to know everything about Disney movies to have fun at Disneyland. All I do is create one side of them: their music. When I thought about that, I felt that I’m ultimately not an entertainer but a musician. And based on that, there’s a part of me that feels like that’s why there should be more people who only make music, and more people who like listening to that music. I think music composed in such a way that you know where you should get excited even when you’re only hearing that song for the first time is the majority right now and better geared to live performing as well, but if there were more people who could listen to music outside of that style, I believe musicians would also have an easier time creating songs freely and different varieties of music could spread across the world, too.
When you think of it that way, maybe this is becoming a difficult era for CAPSULE to work in. I start to wonder when musicians got caught up in this kind of subcontract work. I think we should be able to make music more for ourselves. In the end, though, maybe it's all about striking a balance.
You’re right. Even though it shouldn’t have been that way starting out, right now, I believe that music made only with the thought of sales as its goal is becoming the majority. Of course, there’s interesting music to be heard even out of what’s made with commercial prospects as its main priority, but if there was more that wasn’t like that, it’d make for greater diversity in music. That I even have this sort of thing on my mind, too, is because lately I feel like I’m going back to how I felt when I first started making music in middle school. I guess it’s how I felt when I was simply creating in silence without any intention of letting someone hear it. That was my starting point, so it was never for anyone else.
I imagine this change in the writing of your unit name might also overlap with that mental state, but what were your intentions in switching from lowercase to uppercase as of this release? I probably shouldn’t be saying this after all this time, having been active under it for over ten years and all, but… Don’t you think lowercase is really small? (laughs)
Hahahahahahaha! I’d always thought it looked really tiny. Other than that, I think I wanted a reset.
That’s part of the return to the feelings you had circa junior high that you were talking about before. Right, right. Like, I guess middle schoolers really would be all about straightforward uppercase letters (laughs).
(laughs) Incidentally, the issue of stylizing your name in uppercase versus lowercase is also reflected in the title of CAPS LOCK. How was it that you came up with the title this time around? It started with creating the new CAPSULE logo, first of all. This time, when I was contemplating the album cover, I’d typically used Koshijima-san’s face up until now, but it all came about with the decision to adopt something more like a code for this one. Even the need to prepare an artist photo in the first place is uncomfortable for me. Of course, there’s a new CAPSULE artist photo for a variety of reasons, too, but this time, in any case, I was fixated on doing something symbolic. Even the content of the songs — it’s expected to sing about some meaningful thing, isn’t it? I think it should be fine for songs without meaning to exist, and I think it should be fine for there to be musicians like that. Both the album and song titles are thoroughly rendered in code for that reason. The reference to the caps lock function in itself has a strong nuance of being added on after the fact. If I wanted to be extreme about it, any title would’ve been fine. For instance, the title could’ve even been Ramen and then the song titles could’ve been “Shoyu Ramen,” “Miso Ramen”…
Hahaha. That’s no good. Nakata-kun, people are going to think you’ve lost your mind. There’s too much significance to ramen, so that’s a joke, but it’s about the same feeling. For another example, the album title might be 01 and then the song titles would be “A,” “B,” “C,” and so on.
Then how about if you were to name a major difference between this and your last album musically? This album hasn’t been made with live performances in mind, so I suppose I’ve been set free in that sense. Until now, I’d forced myself a little to do something more rooted in entertainment, but even if there were naturally things that widened my perspective from doing that, on the other hand, there are just as many areas in which I was significantly limited songwriting-wise. When you assume a situation for something, you restrict your listeners as well. In the end, though, it comes down to simply having wanted to make music for myself, music for the sake of music.
In our last interview, you said that Koshijima-san’s position in the unit had changed slightly. She’d started to take a more proactive role in the directing of your work. However, it seems to me that her position has changed again this time. At the time of our previous interview, there was a part of me that felt that CAPSULE should sell better. So I’d wanted to place the vocals more in the foreground, and even when I first started working on this album, the plan was for there to be more so-called vocal-heavy songs. But halfway through, I reconsidered its direction. From there, I threw out all the tracks with a high ratio of vocals and the amount of songs I had went down. I just think I would’ve felt incredibly uncomfortable if I’d forced myself to keep going in that direction.
Are there a lot of troublesome aspects to creating music to sell? It’s no trouble or anything of the sort, but when various arrangements come into the picture, it’s going to be heard by a good number of people, isn’t it? For instance, you’ll have to answer to the needs of everyone who listens to it, make songs that will go with your tie-ins and so on. Instead of having each song picked up individually in that way, though, I wanted it to be more like a flat collection of works as an album.
There’s no sense of duty as far as answering to expectations? I started composing these despite not being asked for anything by anyone, so I think music made like that should be able to exist as well. Just given that that’s the type of album it is, though, I’d be really happy if a lot of people listened to it.