As a DJ, member of his own unit capsule, sound producer/remixer for a wide variety of artists, organizer for the club event contemode saloon and an art director and designer to boot, Nakata Yasutaka is prolific across many fields. In this interview, he talked to us about capsule’s new album FRUITS CLiPPER released on May 10th, his label, the events and unit activities he pursues outside of capsule, and his stance on music.

I feel the electro and filter house-style songs we’ve gotten a glimpse of since your last release have come to stand out more than ever on your latest work FRUITS CLiPPER, but taking that angle into account, could you tell us the concept of your new album? The [electronic] sound itself was something I’d thought to do since a long time ago. I have an event I run called contemode saloon, but playing different songs for that event, there was a moment when I realized, “Oh, people will even dance to tracks like these nowadays.” So I thought it might not be a problem for me to do that style with capsule at this point either. At events, I play the songs I’m thinking might inspire the next thing I make. Since around last year, whenever I played something kind of rockish or hard electro, the reception seemed to indicate that they preferred that style for the most part… I thought “Right?” myself (laughs).

There’s a greater sense of masculinity to the sound than what you’ve done previously. Until now, capsule has felt relatively geared towards girls, hasn’t it? I think it’ll still have that sort of character going forward, but it may not go over well with the boy fans who like that kind of girly stuff. Before, they’d play [capsule’s songs] in boutiques and places like that, so I thought it’d be nice if, say, girls who liked clothes and interior decorating and collecting little trinkets would listen to us, but… In spite of making them to be that way, there’d be boys who liked that kind of mood themselves, and capsule started to become [more than it was at the beginning] music without much relevance to gender. I’m happy that the ratio of boys who come to my events is increasing, but I feel like it’s mostly boys who tell me “Please make more cute songs!” (laughs) Isn’t it true that girls are often quicker to evolve?

Like girls tend to have a greater ability to adapt to things than boys… That’s exactly it: I think girls are more adaptive and alter themselves perfectly to fit with the evolving times, quickly grasping the way to enjoy each moment, whereas boys more or less stay the same. So I wondered if girls would stop listening to our music at first, but now I’m starting to think it actually might’ve gotten less popular with the boys who’ve listened to capsule for a long time… Well, I don’t really care about that anyway (laughs).

Ah, so you typically don’t pay any mind to it (laughs).

I don’t. I’m not the type to always be doing the same kind of music, so if I don’t continue to pursue what I like right now in this moment, it just isn’t fun for me personally. And the thought of people listening to and enjoying something I myself don’t enjoy makes me feel a little uncomfortable. So if people can have fun listening to something I had fun making, we can both get excited about that together without any guilty feelings on my side. Creating something based on the thought that it might be more likely to sell feels like tricking people and I don’t really like that.

Compared to before, it’s taken on more of a “danceable sound” with rhythm rather than melody at its core. It feels like it’s shifted from a culture club to a sports club (laughs). Plus, it’s not like capsule just debuted yesterday, so if there are people who’ve been listening to us since the beginning, there’ll naturally be people on the opposite extreme who started listening to us after hearing our latest album. Putting it that way, a lot of the people who started listening to us through this album seem to be more active-minded. I guess because capsule has generally leaned towards the design side until now. Like an art club, for example… (laughs)

Kind of internally focused? That’s it. I’d gotten pretty tired of that, and I wanted to make music you could listen to outside more easily. Thinking of people inside their homes surrounded by fashionable interiors and totally immersed in themselves made me feel sort of disgusted, too (laughs). Listening to music outside, there’s a lot of noise, especially in the city. I wanted to make it so that even if your surroundings were really loud, it’d become part of the music as you listened to it on headphones using an iPod or a Walkman. That’s the concept this time. Something that sounds cool amid the noise. Rather than something meant to be listened to quietly, it sounds good even if there are people talking — in fact, it might be boring even if you did listen to it quietly. I think that kind of “club vibe” influenced me strongly in that respect. I wanted this album’s rhythm to be strong enough to withstand a loud environment and make that noise feel like part of the BGM in its own right.

I feel as if it’s been capsule’s concept to treat the voice like another instrument for some time now, but maybe because your latest album has an emphasis on particularly carnal tracks, the vocals, to me, are closer to sequences than melodies. Did you consciously produce them to be that way? What I want to do and the timing of that is another factor, but the fact that capsule never started out like a band probably plays a big role as well. Since there’s a fixed member on vocals, I’ve tried to be somewhat attentive to her presence and highlight that across the songs as a whole in the past,but this album took on the balance it has as an extension of me creating it freely. I don’t know how it’ll be in the future.

That is to say it’s changing rapidly as you progress towards the music you want to do... You’ve got it. To put it the opposite way, that’s part of why I feel like maybe capsule will never change. It’s not that the type of music we make will always stay the same, but I’ll always approach it from the perspective of what kind of balance I want to create with right now. It feels like to the extent that I’ve been allowed to do what I want to do, we’ve been able to last for a long time. If I only think about it in terms of how I go about the work, capsule is a unit that operates like a solo project. So I think the [new album’s] sound is something I could only release now. And I believe there are many interesting things like that which can only be done in the present.

Your new album FRUITS CLiPPER is marked by that desire to do something fresh, modern and interesting. Next, I’d like to ask about your roots as a sound creator. Could you tell me about what first pushed you to start writing songs? I don’t think my family is quite to the degree of being audio fanatics, but we were a music-loving household. We had tons of records, and my parents replaced their speakers and such constantly. So there were no instruments, but I was never lacking for speakers or amps. We kept all the audio equipment we weren’t sure we’d have any further use for lying around in our storage room. So rather than making music… I took connector cables and messed with them a lot, plugging the red and white ones in to see how I could get them to make different noises. I’d channel the sound of hitting a speaker through a mic and take apart headphones and things like that [disassembling and rewiring headphones will allow you to use them as a microphone]. So early on, it was almost closer to construction.

So you got into it through engineering. Yes, I started out meddling with hardware. I’d taken piano lessons, so I could recite piano pieces. Then, since I was going so far as to use the sounds like that, I thought maybe I should start to shift from “experiments” to “music.” So it was artistic in a way at first. Using old equipment… It was like Vincent Gallo’s studio.

Then, as you got older, you gradually started putting your equipment in order... I was doing design and music at the same time, though, so I would’ve been fine with either one, as long as I was creating something. That’s why, although I was doing music, I honestly never thought I’d reach the point where I made that my job. Back then, I felt like [music] professionals could make the songs everyone would like, so I let myself produce tracks that’d never make it onto a CD in a million years instead. Rather than everyone hearing it and giving me compliments, it’d be more like… “What is this?” I sort of don’t like when people are openly delighted like “Wow! Amazing! What beautiful music!” There are aspects I want to be appreciated, but I absolutely wanted for there to be some people who hated it among the rest.

You told me you were “doing design and music at the same time, so either one would’ve been fine” as long as you were involved in some sort of creative work, but in an interview with one music magazine, you went so far as to claim you “don’t want to make music for music lovers.” I meant people who don’t seem like they have any interests outside of music more than music lovers exactly. It’s fine to like music, but when they know all kinds of stuff about it and the music they listen to is cool but nothing else about them is, that’s boring, right? I think music can’t survive as music alone. Ultimately, I believe music is a little extra treat on top of your regular life, where you won’t die if you don’t listen to it but you’d like to hear it regardless. When people are absorbed in nothing but music and talk like listening to one type of song makes you lame and another makes you cool, all it does is show me that those people themselves are lame, and I end up thinking “God, what a waste!” (laughs) So I want more people to recognize that even if music is their main focus, there are some people who like other things as much as they love music. I love music a lot myself, of course, but if all you talk about is music, you just end up being an off-putting person.

So not for music geeks… That’s right. I also run a club event [contemode saloon], but I didn’t really want to make it an event where the people who went to it only ever talked about music. More than that, I want to have people like buyers for select shops as DJs and attract a crowd who engages with music as one aspect of their daily lives, so while discussing music is okay, so is asking the other patrons where they bought their clothes. I want to facilitate that sort of space. It’s fine to come because you like music or talk about capsule’s latest CD, but what I’d like for it to be is a gateway or cue for those who want to lead a more interesting lifestyle to recognize and pursue that. That goes for capsule itself, too. So because it’s an event full of those kinds of people, I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing to become an even bigger music geek or a fashion geek or someone who makes their whole living in the hair and makeup world through that, but I hope for it to keep that balance in the future.

How did music come to be linked with interior design and fashion like that for you? When I was a student, there was a time when I did a little bit of design work. As I was doing it, I found myself enjoying the work, and I liked designing, so there was even a period where I thought I wouldn’t mind having it as a job… Then my current management told me capsule was scheduled to make their CD debut in the very near future, and I thought, “Well, it looks like I’ll have to focus solely on music now.” I was a bit fake back when we first debuted. Like a professional, in the worst sense of the word.

capsule’s debut single was rather oriental… Something with a Japanese feeling to it, in the form of a standard pop song. I thought a major debut meant being on a big billboard above the Shibuya 109 building, being popular anywhere you went and hearing your songs whenever you turned on the TV. That was my real miscalculation (laughs). I thought, “Alright! I’m gonna make a song like that!” Once I did that, it was spectacularly dull. Then I decided, “In that case, maybe I should do what I like.” I started designing again, didn’t use a stylist for our clothes but got them from people I knew well instead, and I even looked for makeup artists among my acquaintances… Searching for friends I could work with brought me back to my roots, and I made the decision to create things that were real. That bad kind of professional music is the stuff you can tell the creators don’t really want to be making at all. I didn’t like the thought of becoming like that. I wanted to do what I like so much that I figured if I made the music I prefer and it didn’t sell, I could just do something else besides music to make up for it.

I sense that this is connected to what you said before about capsule being where you want to do what you like at whatever moment. That’s true. I don’t have any inclination to do music as a business like that. If I can do what I like, let people who like that hear it and the number of people listening to it is no more than enough to support my livelihood, that’s a fun time for me!

You’re also active in units like COLTEMONIKHA in addition to capsule. Is there any difference in your own position between those two? I suppose you wouldn’t be wrong to call this vague, but capsule is almost equivalent to me. I imagine I’ll keep working in other units apart from COLTEMONIKHA after this, but for me, I guess it comes down to being something I’ll do if I meet a person who strikes me as interesting. I want to make music with people who aren’t only interested in doing music. Even with COLTEMONIKHA, music isn’t “all” we can do but one of many things we’re able to do… [Sakai Kate] has her own outlook and fields in which she’s competent — to name a few, the ability to weave words and the gift of a captivating voice — that doesn’t end at music alone, and I want to feel the potential in that. If they don’t have that quality, I think there’ll be things we can’t do. Areas someone who thinks “I want to debut through music, I want to work in music” can’t reach. That sort of… Most people who are active in music and releasing CDs are probably always working with the goal of putting out a CD, but that’s… It is bothersome not to have that, but when I think about how there are so many of those people in the world yet they can’t do something different, I want to work with people who have something they’re making unrelated to music.

Maybe that angle is connected to how you ultimately differentiate between capsule and your other units. Like a difference in the air (laughs). There’s a difference in undercurrent between something like what a craftsman makes [musically] and what naturally comes out of a person, of course. I think that atmosphere is important.