Sounds of Japan With Nick Luscombe

How did you first get involved with music recording and sound design?

When I was very young, I’d make up radio shows for fun with my sister using a very basic cassette recorder at my grandparent's place. That’s where it started, I guess! My real interest in sound design commenced however, when I trained as a studio manager and sound engineer at the BBC in the early 90's. Between shifts and training sessions I’d record sounds onto tape and then edit and mix to create layers of edited TV commercials and programs, location recordings and speech. It was fun creating collages of sound this way, it just felt like an enjoyable way to attempt to tell stories via various snippets of audio. Later I discovered the audio art form known as Musique concrète and since then I became drawn towards that style of music composition but using sounds that were more human and more engaging.

Do you actively seek out new projects or do they come to you? How does it work?

I think it‘s both actually. For example, on BBC Sounds there‘s a show and a podcast now called Slow Radio, which is a mix of field recordings and people telling stories through gently evolving sound. I have made a few shows for this series here in Japan and this year the BBC asked me to make two more programs. The first was Japanese Spring, which focused on the sounds of Spring, and I made another Slow Radio program focusing on Japanese Winter, which airs in November - packed full of sounds of ice and crunchy snow recorded in the depth of winter in Hokkaido, in the North of Japan. I have another project that I co-founded back in 2010, called Musicity (MSCTY), working with musicians, sound artists and field recordists to tell stories about places and structures through sound and through music.

We’ve been working with architects such as Kengo Kuma, who designed the National Stadium which hosted the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic games. Kuma’s work has always been a massive inspiration to me and he continues to create so many truly dynamic and innovative buildings. MSCTY works in a number of different ways. Sometimes we work with acoustic engineers, like Arup, to measure to the acoustics of a space so that a musician, armed with the knowledge of which frequencies will work best, can create the perfect sound for that space. On another level, we get people to collect recordings from a certain place, and then use that as the foundations for their music. It can be scientific, or it can be purely art based, and about the feeling of a space through its sound.