Here is a (painfully short) interview with Kitasono Minami about his (painfully short) debut LP Meridian. It was published in the July 2025 issue of Guitar Magazine.

Interview & text: Okuda Yuya
English translation: Henkka
Kitasono Minami: Website, Twitter, SoundCloud

Note: You can buy this album on CDJapan.

Kitasono Minami—composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer.

In 2012, he began uploading his music on SoundCloud, instantly attracting attention, and beginning in 2014, he released three EPs within a two-year span. Finally breaking the ten-year period of silence that followed, his new album Meridian has now been released.

This being the first full-length album which he has worked on as the overall producer, its meticulous sound and arrangements were crafted utilizing score-based compositions and remote home-recording techniques. Seldom appearing in the media—no one even knows what he looks like—he is a true talent shrouded in much mystery.

We conducted a face-to-face interview with Kitasono Minami to ask him about his creative vision for this album.

— Following your third EP, this album is your first new release in ten years. What sort of a time was this for you?

Kitasono Minami: It began with me parting ways with the record company who I had been with for three years—ultimately, I just have this extremely strong need to be in charge of absolutely everything myself.

I first started out making home recordings, and for me, I see home recordings as sort of like the boxes of Joseph Cornell. I myself often make boxes like that—call it a hobby or like a way of comforting myself. First, I make the box, and then I put things in it that I’ve found at the flea market or something.

Similarly, the music I make is exactly that type of a small thing. Also, you could say that what I’m aiming for sound-wise is a kind of “intimacy.” That was something that was important to me, and so I decided to go back to working how I used to when making home recordings.

— And from there, you started working independently.

Kitasono: Afterwards, I did some uncredited work and made a living as something of a music composer. At one time I was even producing this band, but then suddenly I remembered that initial spirit that I had, realizing I was supposed to be doing solo work, and I started planning this album in 2020.

In that five-year period up until now, I spent half that time on composing, sound design, and mixing techniques. I studied all kinds of materials in order to achieve a certain standard in all those areas, learning about things like acoustics and the compositional techniques of Western music.

— A monumental work five years in the making, I understand that things like the strings and the wind instruments on this album were recorded remotely all over the world—in Japan, Germany, Ukraine, Argentina, and beyond.

Kitasono: I started recording during COVID when doing these things remotely had already become commonplace. And just as I’d expected, the music on this album really did end up sounding like one of those small boxes. When you go to a flea market, you’ll discover goods from all corners of the world scattered about, but it only requires one person to take those things and arrange them inside a box. I feel like there’s a close resemblance with what I’m doing musically—I’ve really just collected all this material that’s been performed all over the world, and I’m arranging it all side-by-side.

For example, the string section of “Shigosen” was recorded remotely at a commercial studio in Ukraine. This was during a very difficult time, however—the recordings took place in the midst of the war that is still ongoing there even now. Because the studio was located in Kyiv, they experienced power instability during recording when a nearby facility was bombed.

But at the time, I just felt like I wanted to contribute in some way—seeing as they were still offering their services, I felt that the least I could do was to respond in kind. We then kept emailing back and forth, and it resulted in the wonderful performance they sent me. When you listen back to it, you can hear this severely distorted noise in the data especially in the low frequencies. However, since recordings are something that are also meant to document life, I made a point of leaving it on the album.

— You mentioned the word “intimacy”—compared to your earlier works, I definitely noticed the abundance of directly-recorded sounds.

Kitasono: Mixing-wise, I placed emphasis on that sense of intimacy and a kind of “closeness” without a lot of echo. When you mic a cabinet, it’s important to remember that the speaker cone is vibrating and emitting sound in all directions. Because those sound waves will then interfere with one another—and because they go through a microphone—some frequencies will inevitable be captured more sparsely than others.

This is of course not to say that I ever felt the sound from guitar amps is somehow lacking. But purely from a technical standpoint, the fact is that something is always going to be lost when you use them. That’s why I was so hung up on recording directly—to retain as much density of frequency as possible. Even someone like Culture Club‘s Roy Hay makes great use of those close-sounding, half-tone strumming patterns in his songs. There’s just something about recording via plugging directly into the console that gives you such a totally clean sound.

Also, for every song on the album, I’m using over ten different types of reverb and delay. I did that in order to not have everything share the same space, but rather to give each instrument a bit of its own, individual room.

— Every song on this album was fully scored, lending them a sort of intricacy that you just can’t get with arrangements done by ear.

Kitasono: I’ve long been asking myself, “What can you even achieve with mere memorized arrangements?” I see memorized arrangements as a very “physical” way of composing. Conversely, with a fully scored arrangement you clearly lay out a blueprint, very much intentionally and in a coordinated fashion placing each instrument and each sound exactly where you want it.

— Listening to even just the individual notes on the guitar, there’s this structural beauty to them. It’s clear that it’s not something one would think to play on just instinct alone.

Kitasono: Something I was also very interested in doing was experimenting with counterpoint. I was fascinated with the forward energy that you get from approaching a melody with another melody—that is, layering multiple melodies on top of one another.

— In “Shigosen,” you’ve assigned the electric and acoustic guitars their own, independent melodies and roles.

Kitasono: For me, having them do that brings a kind of richness. I mean, working from the premise that multiplicity equals richness. In my mind, by giving each instrument subtle differences—how the melodies progress, when they start, how long they last for—I’m constructing what I see as musical richness.

— That makes sense.

Kitasono: Also, “Weather Loach no Sekitsui” features an ensemble consisting of just three nylon-string guitars, but the way they’re panned and the contrast in the phrases they’re playing make it so that the listener’s point of focus is always shifting. For a time I had a keen interest in the guitar works of Takemitsu Toru, and I believe I was able to express the results of that in this song’s simple, nylon-string guitar arrangement.

— In terms of the guitar sound, something that especially left an impression were the chorus tones, as well as the phrases that almost sound like they’re going out of tune.

Kitasono: I’ve always had this weird obsession with chorus effects. When you hear them, it gives you that unstable, almost “morbid” effect in a way… like in the film Pulp Fiction. John Scofield, who I’m a fan of, is someone who also uses those sorts of tones with an unstable pitch.

You’re right in that I did choose to use some passages where the pitch is unsteady. That has to do with the fact that I’m trying to get the guitar to serve a role that defies conventional logic, because it’s an instrument that first originated with ordinary people who were not really a part of Western music. Especially with stuff like the blues of Robert Johnson or the rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry—there’s these notes there that you just can’t explain, and I feel like that’s where the guitar’s true identity resides. Thus, I assigned the guitar this role where it is both grounded yet carefully venturing off course.

— One can also very much sense how there was a lot of thought put into the structuring of all of the album’s song sections.

Kitasono: Some of my songs are structured in a way where they have three sections, with something “different” placed in the middle. Whenever I’m creating the structural scores for my songs, they tend to be symmetrical—I find myself strangely drawn to that kind of symmetry. Even the “mi-na-mi” in Kitasono Minami is the same when you read it backwards.

Song structure chart provided by Kitasono, notable for the three-part structure consisting of various build-ups and releases between the intro and the outro.

— Please share with us how you generally approach solos.

Kitasono: One thing I’m particular about with my solos is writing them out. Using the bebop method as my foundation, it’s basically like I’m just reconstructing it as I try to refine the solo on the score.

Only the thing is, traditional solos are again something that emerge from a more physical act of composition—the solos that sound like an outcry, or like a statement of some kind. And so depending on the song, what I might do is first I’ll just record myself freely playing a prototype of the solo, and then I’ll fine-tune it on the score, shaping the story that I’m trying to tell with it.

— So at the foundation of your solos is a kind of visceral outcry of sorts.

Kitasono: Right, something that transcends reason… You often hear people saying things like how there’s a part of their brain that just switches off when they’re improvising in their playing. I do think there are certain things you can only achieve through that kind of “physical composition.”

— Thank you. Lastly, could you tell us about your plans moving forward?

Kitasono: I’ve spent many years thinking about what exactly I’m meant to be doing as a musician, and I’ve come to think that ultimately, my job is to give inspiration to others. And if that is my purpose, then I believe that I’m now going in the right direction. This album became the first step in embodying that whole idea. The other concept I think about is the reconstruction of pop music through score-based composition and modern sound design.

As I continue exploring ways of combining those two elements, I’ve already started working on my next release.