Masahiko Amano

My first and most important listener is me. I write things I want to play back myself: “Голос” came out almost two years ago and still turns up on repeat.

What gets me most is contemporary Japanese pop: it sounds light, but stay with it and a whole world opens up, still yielding new detail after dozens of plays. In 未来カンパネラ for AZKi it is the string countermelodies running alongside the vocal, and near the end the way they and the bass pull apart in opposite directions under the kick and crash; in 狼煙 for Ookami Mio, the hard-hitting drums with their sly rhythms and the way the guitars are layered. My reference points: “Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club”, “Wake Up, Girls!”, and much of what is being written for VTubers now.

The same goes for my own work: one instrumental track keeps its melody on three notes, do-re-mi, over jazz harmony that is anything but simple; another runs from end to end in five and never brings a section back: development all the way through. I stay with every part until it holds attention on its own without pulling away from the whole — the bass, for one, usually ends up fairly mobile.

Genre matters far less than that: I stay with a chamber-orchestra work, or a film score now on its way to release, in exactly the same way. Absolute pitch turned up when I was about seven; I studied composition with Stepan Sosnin, who gave me my grounding, beginning with the idea that a piece has to carry a dramatic arc of its own; and I taught myself a DAW at thirteen. Anything that can be played live, I play instead of drawing it with a mouse: keys, guitar and bass are usually mine, and when something calls for what I cannot manage alone, I go looking for a person, not a preset. Some of this has come out under the name H1K0.