OA: Were you into New York No Wave as well?
Kazu: Yeah... though I didn’t know much about it then. Now I know that a lot of them didn’t know how to play guitar either.

OA: Which is quite inspiring, isn’t it?
Kazu: You know I was rather ignorant because I kind of went into it without any concept about it. It actually ended up being kind of good, I think, because I didn’t know there were people before me who’d done a lot of this... that would’ve stopped me from doing it, maybe. But I had no idea, so I was just trying to get done what I needed to get done, without any sort of embarrassment or....information.

OA: Have you lived in NY for a long time now?
Kazu: Yes,  a little over ten years. I never really admit that I live in New York.

OA: Why is that?
Kazu: I came by accident... I kind od didn’t like it so much from the beginning. I didn’t have any fantasy about living in NY, but now I like it, compared to other cities in America. America is a pretty strange place, it’s completely different from Japan. I can’t relate to it, most of the time, it’s very hard for me to relate to it. It’s easier for me to understand or relate to European culture, you know. Like, not that I like England (or the UK) more, but islands in general, I can see people’s mentality a bit more easily. Island mentalities are very specific, I think. Besides these are old countries. America is the complete opposite of that, so....

OA: Well, a lot of the ancient history of the American continent has been erased so....
Kazu: Exactly, yeah, it’s true.

OA: Talking about history..... Do you remember when you heard about Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg? Can you remember or do you just grew up listening to them?

Kazu: Well, it’s really strange because I remember watching movies with my parents, like really bad b-movies with Jane Birkin in them, or Gainsbourg. I remembered when I watched them again, I was like “yeah, I think I have seen this before” so that was just that much. But you know so much of Gainsbourg’s music was derived from classical music and I have listened to a lot of classical music when I grew up, because that was the only kind of music I was allowed to listen to at home. So in a way, I get very moved by the fact that he borrowed a lot from classical music and still created something so original. I think that’s why I like him so much.

OA: He was also a very political artist, playing with tabooes.... which is very empowering too.
Kazu: I don’t know what he was really like, but he seemed to be a very difficult person to live with

OA:  I wouldn’t know, we should ask Jane Birkin. (laughs).... but I guess that people with strong personalities....
But closer to us, and more personal now: about the writing of 23... you might think this is a very innocent and clumsy question, but how do you decide everything for songs. Like what instruments are going to be used, what effects? I know there’s no recipe to write a song... It is a magical act of creation, but can you give us some examples or explain in what kind of perspective you worked on this album.
Kazu: It really was an accident. There was a song I really wanted to work. In my head, it was a more simple groovy song, in the style of Gainsbourg, or something like this, but it never quite worked.... though I was incisting.  Meanwhile Simone and Amedeo were working on something else and then, just because we were just kind of frustrated, they suggested we put them together. It was infuriating for me. I was like: “I’m not gonna give my song to your ....stuff!” Eventually, I tried and literally.... how to say this? Well, it was half time, like my melody worked as half slow. If I really wanted to make it work, I should have sped it up twice as fast, but I just kept its ballad like atmosphere, and they were playing really double tempo, so that’s how “23” came about: that really stretchy melody over this quite groovy thing. Then at that point, I was converted and thought this could really work. But it was one of the songs we paid least attention to, so whenever we didn’t have anything else better to do, we would work on “23”

OA: Then it ends up opening the whole album and giving its title even.
Kazu: yeah, but it was ok for me. I knew it was gonna be a very important song for me, because I really liked it. I didn’t want to overwork it. You know when you like something so much, you kind of don’t wanna like conclude anything too clearly, you want to keep all options open, so it was really ok for me we never worked too much on it, just a bit here and there, then leave it alone for a while. It’s just one of those songs. When that happened, I knew it was gonna be special. Another thing that was a bit different: I always had this thing about my vocal sounding too pretty. I hate my voice, so pretty and kind of high, it’s so annoying! I always want to be lower and as nasty as possible, but for this one I really wanted to sound beautiful. I wanted to sound like I’m not from this world. So that was another thing I tried hard to do, and I had never tried it before in my life. I told the engineer: “please, make my voice sound as beautiful as you can possibly make it”.

OA: You talk a lot about “what THEY are working on and what YOU are working on”, how do you then deal with ownership issues in your work?
Kazu (smiling widely):  You can kind of tell by who’s singing it. I guess that’s the way we incist the ownership of it. (laugh)

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