Maki Tomoda Interview Official

The journalist asks if she feels vindicated by the recent re-discovery of her work by Western DJs. Does she feel like a legend?

The most profound moment comes at the end. The journalist, running out of time, asks the cliché: What advice would you give to your younger self? maki tomoda interview

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. The journalist asks if she feels vindicated by

“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.” The journalist, running out of time, asks the

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.

“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.”