“Music is not a product,” she states, tapping a lacquered fingernail on the table. “It is a verb. It is the action of listening to the silence between things.”
Maki Tomoda passed away two years later, surrounded by analog synthesizers and blooming cherry blossoms. Her garden, as it turns out, was full of vegetables for the local food bank. maki tomoda interview
“I would tell her,” she says finally, looking not at the journalist, but at a rain-streaked window overlooking Shibuya, “that being difficult is not the same as being true. But also… that being liked is overrated. The goal is not to be understood. The goal is to be recognizable —so that the one person who needs to find you, can.” “Music is not a product,” she states, tapping
She speaks of her years as a session musician in Los Angeles in the late 80s, where she was told to anglicize her name to "Mandy." She refused. She was fired from three sessions in one week. She recounts this not with bitterness, but with a kind of anthropological curiosity, as if describing the mating habits of a strange, lesser-evolved species. Her garden, as it turns out, was full
The interviewer, a young journalist from a fringe music zine, is visibly nervous. He asks about her infamous 1979 album, Genso no Hate (At the Edge of Illusion)—a record so ahead of its time that it was shelved for two decades. He stumbles over the word "kayōkyoku," trying to fit her into a box of retro city-pop revivalism.
“You are looking for a ghost,” she says, adjusting her black-rimmed glasses. “The girl who sang on that record died a long time ago. Not tragically. She just… became unnecessary.”
This piece is fictional, composed in the spirit of her legacy, as no extensive English-language interview with Maki Tomoda is widely available.
