Forest of Tranquillity: In Conversation with Masayoshi Fujita
Japanese musician Masayoshi Fujita began his musical journey with Bon Jovi and Portishead, and since then, the vibraphone has become his instrument of choice. This November, he’s releasing his newest record, Forest of Tranquility, which evolved from his commissioned work for Expo 2025. Fujita aimed to cultivate a peaceful, natural space, using 1,500 real trees to ensure his vision for this installation was met. His work is driven by this connection between humanity, peace, and nature, embodying the ideology of Japanese kankyō ongaku or environmental music. This is tangibly felt within Forest of Tranquility, with the title track and ‘Portal to the Universe’ bathing the listener in calming sounds, reflecting Fujita’s ethos. We asked Fujita about his processes, his creativity and this upcoming release.
What first drew you to the vibraphone and making instrumental music?
When I was young, I got into American rock, bands like Bon Jovi, and started playing drums. I played with my school friends, and later in some other bands. Around the age of twenty, I became interested in electronic music through Portishead, and I started to want to make my own music. I got more into ambient, dub, electronica and so on. I wanted to make music with the sound of the vibraphone, because I knew that sound from the records my father would play at home and I liked it very much. So I looked for a vibraphone player to play with but couldn’t find one. Then I met a jazz vibraphonist and took lessons from him, and played the vibraphone myself for the first time. I was amazed by its sound, and that decided my path. I especially love the sound of the vibraphone when it is played softly and sparsely behind vocals or other instruments. I felt not many players play it that way, and I wanted to explore that.
How has your understanding of your work and your sound changed since the beginning of your musical endeavour?
Before, especially when I was in Berlin, I was striving to create something great within the framework of Western values, or Western aesthetics. Now I am more interested in pursuing what I can and what I should as a Japanese person, born and raised on this land. In the past, I often looked inward, searching for something deeply personal. Now I’m more interested in how the sounds I create exist in the world around me, influenced by the environment, and how they flow naturally and make sense here.
Do you think that space, place and surroundings have an impact on your work? Where do you feel the most creative?
Yes, very much. I lived in Berlin for thirteen years. It was a stimulating place, but while my music often reflects a connection with nature, I couldn’t feel that connection in the land where I lived. I felt like a rootless plant. Living and creating in nature was my long-time dream, and in 2020 we moved with our three children to a small village in the mountains of Hyogo.
My studio is in a former nursery school building. I can play my instruments whenever I like, and from the window I can see the mountains, the trees, the clouds and the fog. Every day, as I play or listen to music, I’m surrounded by that view.
I feel the most creative when I’m in my studio. All my instruments are always set up and miked, and my effects and synthesizers are connected to the mixer, so I can record whenever an idea comes. I’ve also made it easy to change the setup of the instruments and the routing of the effects and synthesizers, to stay flexible when different ideas come up.
How do you work with nature in your music?
I don’t look at something and reflect it directly in the music, or use it as a motif. As I live and work surrounded by nature in the mountains, the scenery I see every day accumulates, and it influences the music indirectly. I’m trying to live properly first, putting down roots in the community, working in the fields, going into the mountains to cut trees to maintain the forest and to get firewood, and being close to nature as much as I can. I believe that affects my art. Living here also helps me feel myself as a part of nature. Here I can see the micro-seasons, different flowers blossoming one after another, week by week, as if waiting for their turn. When I make music now, I tend to look for sounds that resonate with the surroundings, sounds that make sense in this environment.
What’s the ideal place to listen to Forest of Tranquility?
I’m often asked this, and it’s a difficult question for me. I kinda feel people expect me to say “in nature”, but I think that in nature, we should listen to the sounds of nature, not music. So I would be happy if people listen to it on a commuter train, or in their own room in the city, and feel like they are taken somewhere else. If someone in a busy city hears the album and, even for a moment, senses that something vast is there behind the sounds, that would make me happy.
How do you use music to interpret space and place?
When I play outdoors, having music there sometimes makes you hear the surrounding sounds more. Especially where you can hear the sounds of nature, I try to be aware of the sounds around me, listen to them as carefully as to the sounds I make myself, and interplay with them. That is not a chance you get very often, and it is very interesting.
When I play in a place with a unique acoustic, like a church, I often try to play in a way that makes the most of the reverberation. Sometimes I also play with the feeling of collaborating with the atmosphere and the story that the place has.
For the Expo installation, the forest was a man-made one, so my idea was to bring in the feeling of the real nature where I live. My first aim was to bring depth to that forest through the music. That was another way of collaborating with a place through music.
If you could soundtrack any tv show or movie, what would it be?
I like the films of Tarkovsky, Abbas Kiarostami and Kubrick. But there are not many among them that I would want to write music for. Many of them don’t need music, or they are already complete with the music they have. If I were to compose a soundtrack, I would like to work with the director from the stage when the film is still being made. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films might be interesting.
I read that the process of creating instruments for you is very practical and experimental. How did this come about and how do you approach making new sounds?
I don’t really build instruments. It is more that I add things to the vibraphone. I prepare the vibraphone with things like strings of beads and tin foil, or play it with a cello bow.
A couple of years ago I used metal pipes in a project with other artists, and since then I’ve often used them in my set. I place a few pieces of metal pipe and metal plate on top of the vibraphone and hit them together with the bars. It brought a new approach and widened my palette of sounds. I also use orin, small singing bowls, ethnic bells, tingsha, a Sailophone, and cymbals played with a cello bow. I use metal and other untuned instruments because I’m interested in new harmonies and sound worlds that are not bound by the framework of Western tuning.
How do you approach collaborations and what benefit do they give your personal musical evolution?
I think collaboration means more when you already have your solo work, where you have clearly expressed your own sound. I think that is the difference from being in a band. When I collaborate, I try to respond to the sounds the other person plays, or sends to me. In a collaboration I end up composing and playing with sounds that I couldn’t make on my own, and I think that is the point of collaborating. So I try not to rely on my usual habits, and I value the ideas and sounds that come up in the moment.
Collaborations are often a great learning experience for me, because I can see things that I don’t have, or that are different from mine, like their range of musical ideas, their ways of making music, their mindset and their attitude toward creation. Learning about that attitude from artists I respect is especially valuable.
What are you listening to right now, what artists represent the autumn period for you?
Recently I’ve been listening to Tim Hecker, Geinoh Yamashirogumi and Rhythm & Sound often. They don’t particularly represent autumn, but they don’t feel out of place in it either. I don’t need music to feel the seasons.
Listen to Forest of Tranquility on the 13th of November!
Edited by Eva Lau-Johnston, Co-Music Editor
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