Japan

It was really exciting for me because I was obsessed with Japan as a teenager, and then I was doing what sort of teenagers do : I was reading books on Zen Buddhism, wearing kimonos, eating sushi, and reading, you know, Machine Man, something like that. I decided since I’ve got so little time, I’ve got to build on that. You know, that was twenty years ago, because that’s something that’s brewed inside me for a while and got layers to it.

Just kind of more like what I like music to be, something not superficial or surface stuff, but like something that’s integrated within you for a long time. And then, somehow, to sort of connect with that and also to read something I’ve never read, though it was also a bit fresh for me, was the Shinto stuff. And that actually ended up being really really helpful because I realized that that’s maybe the reason why I felt there’s similarities between Iceland and Japan, because they’ve got this kind of pagan religion that is still in the country.

You know, we’ve got technology, but when Buddhism came to Japan in the year 800 I think it was the only Asian country that didn’t sort of erase whatever nature pagan religion there was there before. You know, kind of what the English did to the Druids or whatever when Christianity came. That didn’t happen in Japan, and it didn’t happen in Iceland as well, but because of a totally other set of reasons.

BBC Radio 3, Mixing It, 5 august 2005