Listen to the playlist 'This Is Akira Kosemura' as you read:
“I never really studied music, in the sense I never attended any kind of official conservatory,” says Akira Kosemura from his home studio in Tokyo. “I studied classical piano until middle school but then my piano teacher passed away from cancer, and I stopped. In high school I got involved in bands and started to make music in different ways. I never thought of doing music as a profession. I did it more as a personal hobby and thought that as I got older I would find my real path. It was when I got sick for a few months, and lost the balance of my physical and mental health, that things changed. As a way to recover, I went to my local park to listen to music and read books, and started to make videos and field recordings…”
Akira’s career since deciding to return to his piano and make music professionally has followed a remarkable trajectory. His debut record It’s on Everything in 2007 was released via Australian label Room40 while he was still in university, and he founded his own label, Schole Records, soon after. He proceeded to produce his own albums at a rate of nearly one a year, including standouts such as Polaroid Piano (2009), Grassland (2010), One Day (2016) and In the Dark Woods (2017), gradually weaving electronics, vocals, wind and string instruments into his expanding palette.
“When I made those first albums, I already had a synthesiser and recording machine at home from the school band days, when we were listening to Aphex Twin and Squarepusher as well as local bands like Supercar. But it was while making and using those field recordings that I started to not only see but also hear a different landscape. I started to edit the sounds in the same way that I would edit the video, initially as a way of supporting the film. Then I started to add synthesiser and piano and as it developed, I realised I could pursue music as a career.”
His most significant release during those early years was Polaroid Piano, he says. “It was the first album in Japan recorded with felt piano. Chilly Gonzales and others had done it elsewhere, but no one in Japan. The idea came from Lawrence English, who had made some compositions for some of David Lynch’s photos. He said it would be interesting to make music like a Polaroid photo, where you only have one chance to write some music. So I sat in front of some images and used some of my own field recordings as a basis for ten songs. I gave myself only 30 minutes and only allowed one take for each song. It was a challenging album and I thought it would get criticized, but it got a good review on Pitchfork and then Devendra Banhart contacted me to work together. So it proved a turning point in my career.”
By the 2010s, Akira’s music was garnering more attention worldwide, getting ranked in Spotify’s “Most Played Japanese Artists/Songs Top 10”, and reviewed and acclaimed not only on music websites such as Pitchfork, but also Australian newspaper THE AGE, and public broadcasters such as France’s FIP, and Canada’s Ici Musique. During this time, he also began to branch out into ballet—a 2012 score for choreographer Kimiho Hulbert’s Manon; film soundtracks (2014’s Embers, 2017’s Bring on the Melody, 2018’s Mais vous etes fous), and TV series such as Japan’s Meet Me After School (2018), TBS drama series Chugakusei Nikki (2018), and Oprah Winfrey Network’s Love Is… (2018).
In more recent years he has taken on ever-bigger projects, writing music for 2020’s True Mothers by Naomi Kawase, Fragments of The Last Will by Takahisa Zeze (2022), the Nintendo Switch video game JackJeanne and SK-II STUDIO’s documentary The Center Lane, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda (2021). His music was also used for the US trailer of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans (2022), and Akira has even turned his talents to fashion runways (Takahiro Miyashita's The Soloist), ocean conservation project La Mer Blue Heart, and scores for global brands from Land Rover to L’occitane.
For his soundtrack and instrumental work, he cites listening to the music of John Williams, James Horner and Thomas Newman as influences. “I was a huge movie fan,” he says. “I went to a lot of cinemas when I was young. Here in Tokyo at that time, you could pay for a ticket and stay there all day, watching the same film more than once; there were even tickets for standing places. At that time, movies were more familiar to me and more inspirational than music. I was interested in doing film music even back then but didn’t know how to do it. I first needed an offer from a producer or director, and eventually someone asked me and I learned on the job so to speak. To be honest, I am still learning that job in many ways.”
In 2022, Akira signed a contract with the prestigious Decca label, resulting in the EP Pause (almost equal to) Play and the album Seasons, which expressed the beauty of Japan's four seasons through solo piano, released to great acclaim in 2023. His latest Close Eyes EP for the label consists of three brand-new compositions to celebrate World Sleep Day that capture his melodic, peaceful style perfectly. “The music I make is very close to me,” says the composer. “I consider it very intimate. My original reason for making it, after all, was to heal myself, a kind of rehabilitation technique and it is still part of my everyday life, or perhaps an extension of it. It’s like breathing for me, so it was natural to choose sounds for this EP that make me relaxed and comfortable and that I could actually sleep to.”
While the neoclassical scene is still tiny in comparison to the core classical scene in Japan, Akira doesn’t really regard himself as belonging to either—more as someone who just plays piano and makes music for different purposes. His creative process still involves taking walks in the same park he retreated to when he was sick. “It still inspires me,” he says. “But so does just sitting in front of my keyboards, especially my MiniMoog Model D or my hundred-year-old Taisho organ.” And yet he is clearly someone who needs to push himself creatively: he describes his new album, which will be released later this year, as “my most challenging work so far. It has many guest vocalists, uses Asian and European instruments and is very different to Seasons. It looks at the world from a very different perspective.”
Words by Paul Sullivan
Akira Kosemura's new Solo Piano EP titled Close Eyes will be released March 14th, the first single Kasumi is available to stream here.
