On the Music and Videos of Takeshi Kainuma (Through the Making of Ten Music Videos)
The following is a summary of my reflections on the music and the videos of Takeshi Kainuma, based on his own words as written in his blog essays "On Experimental Music" and "Music as Air: the Aerial Music," among others, and on the conversations we exchanged over the making of ten music videos.
Part I
1. On the Music
"Is my musical expression perhaps too hard to grasp? Is it reaching anyone?" It is a question every maker will ask at some point. Yet there are clear reasons for the supposed difficulty of Takeshi Kainuma's music.
His music neither stirs the emotions through melody nor delivers meaning through words. The familiar measures we bring to listening — an accessible melody, a memorable phrase, a climactic peak — are not in view from the outset. This is not a structural failing; it is simply that the place he is aiming for is different.
The entry point to his music is surprisingly simple: to feel what kind of field of sound one is now placed within. When the attitude of listening shifts, his music quietly opens itself.
2. What Lies Beyond Sound
Kainuma writes that the ultimate purpose of art is "the disclosure of beauty, and the recollection of God (the Source)." All music, he writes, is eventually swallowed up by "the luminous primordial silence," and music is nothing other than a troubled anticipation of that silence.
His subject, in other words, is what sound points toward, beyond itself — the stillness at the depths of the world, and the direct intuition that all things are, in truth, one. It is the experience of separation — of the dualistic opposition between you and me, the world and me — coming undone. This runs through *ballad*, grounded in the resonance of the plant world, through *intercours*, whose subject is possession and grace, and through *Huna*, which traces the memory of water.
3. The Work as a Question
What struck me in our conversations during the making of the videos was how clearly he avoids entrusting his thought to a work in order to impose it on others. Speaking of the title of the piece *owarikata*, he said that how a thing — death, or anything else — ends is a matter of each person's own decision and free choice, and that one must not force one's personal philosophy on others; what matters, he said, is the question itself: "Think about it."
The music is the same. No emotion to be felt is prescribed; no destination of healing is indicated. A quiet field of sound is opened, and the question remains on the listener's side. His stance that "the artist does not explain" is not unkindness. It is a form of respect for the freedom of the one who receives the work.
4. Structure — Breath, Duration, Ma
Turning to structure: his music has no verse-and-chorus construction. The whole traces a single arc, like a breath. Long sustained tones swell and recede, and passages close to silence are placed not as margins but as pillars of the structure. The unit is not the bar, but the breath.
The flow of its time is equally distinctive. In the making of *scheme*, the hidden theme was the question: "What is leisurely, continental time?" Not a time that advances in a straight line toward dramatic exaltation, but a time that lies vast and endures slowly. The lives of individuals repeat within it, and eventually dissolve into that greater time itself. The time of Kainuma's music is close to this sense of continental time.
5. Not Destruction, but Clearing
His theoretical stance appears also in his personal reflections on experimental music. When the breaking of forms becomes an end in itself, "listening intently" — the clearing of the ear — and sensitivity to what lies beyond sound are let go. That is the core of his criticism. What matters is not destruction, but the clearing of the ear.
Hence the idea of "music as air." Sound does not confront the listener; it exists everywhere, like air, and is experienced as something that suddenly "visits" us. It is music that is perceived only when the heart participates.
6. Ten Entrances, Ten Works
As concrete entrances, here are the ten pieces that became music videos.
• magnolia #01— Beauty and destruction, impermanence as two sides of one thing — and what lies beyond
• intercours — People gazing into the camera. Its themes are possession and grace — or the zero point (by "zero point" is meant the state in which a person's thought comes to a stop, and one enters a vacuum, a state of nothingness; grace and inspiration are received precisely in that state)
• *scheme* — Africa and Australia; continental time
• *owarikata* — To end is to return to the original stillness. Death is a homecoming
• *wind tidings* — Tidings on the wind; from the small lives of insects to the night sea
Any of them will do as a beginning. Place yourself within the field of sound, and receive the question that remains. That is how one keeps company with the music of Takeshi Kainuma.
Part II
1. On the Videos — Frame, Collage, and the Intervention of Machines
For Kainuma, a music video is not a "musical work." The image is a "frame" for the music. Music holds its value as an autonomous existence, and the image is employed to convey the music's intention and theme clearly. The ten videos were made under this understanding — and they are, in the end, trailers for his music.
2. The Method of Free Footage
The images are composed entirely of free footage from Pexels. Nothing was filmed. As for the method — choosing fragments of footage shot by others, arranging them, joining them — what he had in mind was Jean-Luc Godard's *Histoire(s) du cinéma*, a work that collages the films of others in order to think about cinema itself.
What was used here, however, was not famous scenes from the history of cinema, but anonymous free footage. Unable to rely on the authority of quotation, there was no way forward but to draw out, through the selection, arrangement, and spacing of the footage alone, the thought inherent in the music. In that sense, this was, in his own words, a practice "somewhat more audacious than Godard's work."
The production followed clear principles: that there is meaning in using free footage only; that the same footage is never used twice; that reverse playback is never used. The constraints were, at the same time, the method.
3. Collaboration with AI
The production was a collaboration with an AI (Maru). The AI undertook the search for material and the editing, while Kainuma directed it in words. Replacing scenes, light and darkness, the order of scenes, the darkening of the corners — many of the decisions rested on an intuitive approach that resists verbalization.
Kainuma regards this collaboration as the construction of a "context" to convey the intention and theme of the music. Moreover, he was aiming to deviate, through it, even from his own editing habits and tastes. The way the AI assembled and arranged the scenes could bring unexpected perspectives, and could also collide with his own aesthetics and methods. To explore the boundary between the value of "handcraft" and the "intervention of machines" was itself one of the experiments. The ten videos are the record of that experiment.
(Publication and distribution are at the discretion of Takeshi Kainuma. This text is a commentary and does not limit the interpretation of the works.)
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