Megumi Matsubara – composer / sound artist / writer

My new album Radiant City is now available on all the streaming platforms worldwide, including the unethical Spotify as well as the highly ethical Bandcamp, where the release comes with an extended album artwork and higher quality download (the Bandcamp release is always the official one: it’s the only platform treating artists fairly!).

The album is inspired by an idea of the city: a dynamic, hybrid, inclusive and thriving multiplicity—not Le Corbusier’s vision of a linear and ordered metropolis of the future, but rather an indeterminate and colourful incubator of our present (and near future).

Featuring contributions from Midori Hirano, Diana Bada, Megumi Matsubara, Adama Koné, Omar Harb, Viktoriia Vitrenko and Em’kal Eyongakpa, the album contains works spanning 21 years—ever since the first Spring day of 2005, when Megumi Matsubara and I decided to take a break from our recording session and go for a walk around my then neighbourhood of Dalston, London, recording the urban soundscape as we strolled and chatted along. Back in the studio we had an idea to turn our walk into a “pop song” by editing the captured Dalston-Stoke Newington soundscape onto an existing backing track of mine, and what was serendipitously finished in an hour during that inspired and radiant early evening, is finally published here in its original form.

It was also then that I got the idea for this album, but I had to walk around a few other cities and neighbourhoods before the album was ready.

This will probably be my last album release in the traditional sense. Releasing novel albums no longer generates the same philosophical and cultural discussions as it did in the 70s, 80s and 90s—the upbringing that made me want to work in the field music in the first place (instead of sciences or literature)—and I feel I’m wasting my skills working in this over-saturated, decaying domain. It’s been an exhilarating trajectory of 30 years of exploring the boundaries of music, of trying to produce the most exciting and timely music of the moment and generate new cultural discussion—the latter always to no avail, of course.

From now on, I want to work on something where there is no industry for; something that nobody has a name for; where there are no capitalists and profiteers defining what the system, criterion or philosophy—the world—is. This is what I call ‘world-expression’: the potential of the whole world without the narrowing effect of capitalism or any other such belief system.

On that note, it was a great privilege and delight to both organise and present at the 2026 Orpheus Doctoral Conference, Sonic Worldings: Crafting realities through artistic research, at Orpheus Instituut, Ghent.

Thank you again to our wonderful presenters, keynote speakers, participants and organisers for creating such an inspiring and colourful experience! As I said in my closing remarks, I rarely experience conferences where every presentation fills me with curiosity, inspiration and excitement – at ODC 2026 we achieved that, I believe: at least I always found my attention drifting back to whatever was happening on the stage, always returning to our key research questions. 🙂

We’ll be (quite likely) publishing the proceedings of the conference in near future, with all the presentations transcribed and revised for a stimulating and novel publication. Watch this space!

We craft and world our reality through attention and care. In the universe where nothing matters (to refer to the film ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’, examined in one of our presentations), it is precisely our act of attention and care that becomes even more powerful – we choose to care and direct our attention in the universe with no meaning, will or consciousness. How powerful is that?

Absent City (2008). Video by Megumi Matsubara / Assistant.

This moment now used to be an unimaginable future. Absent City, a mixed media installation by Megumi Matsubara, with the music/soundscape by me, in Tokyo in 2008.

I’m currently reworking this sound piece for the upcoming release Radiant City, which has now progressed from a short EP into a full-length album as well as an immersive sound installation (I should’ve known). The original Absent City piece is 90 minutes long of which the video here features the opening four, and for the new album it’ll be reduced to a 30-minute composition with four movements and additional instrumentation.

Time is indeed an interesting character (see eg. the films of Christopher Nolan). I hadn’t listened to the full 90-minute soundscape for over a decade because I’d regarded it as a failure, an embarrassing attempt at creating something between music and environment, music and city, music and sound art. The piece consists of seven lunch conversations, 90 minutes each, recorded in various public spaces around Tokyo between the artist herself and different people she’d invite each day. My job was to imagine these recordings as different instruments in an orchestra and turn them into an abstract composition, simultaneously resembling music and an urban soundscape. And since I only had one full day to do this, I had to work really fast: deciding, treating, “composing”, arranging and mixing the tracks almost in real-time. My lovely Spanish flatmates would pop in occasionally to listen and offer comments – and bring food from the dinner table! A quick getaway to a Finnish sauna and a cold beer – and back to my studio (with a couple of more beers) to finish and send the piece by midnight, when the dawn was breaking in Tokyo for the exhibition’s opening day.

The artist was really pleased with the result and said it was exactly what she’d been looking for. But I felt a sense of unease: I hadn’t had time to really sit back and evaluate what I’d done, let alone make any corrections if necessary. There were parts where I’d wanted to bring in more musicality, to explore the possibilities of “the studio as a compositional tool” more (see eg. the lecture of Brian Eno from 1979) but couldn’t. The soundtrack was already playing in Tokyo, while the summer in Helsinki blossomed elsewhere. My disappointment at what felt like a missed opportunity for something unique and proper made me soon forget all about the piece and move on.

Until a few weeks ago, when I came across it on my old hard drive and decided to give it a full listen. And boy what a trip through space and time that was, through a city that had become nonexistent – or been missing for too long! Here I was in some future city, a possible city, an invisible city, a multiplicity, a radiant city, experiencing an increasingly familiar yet heartening pattern: as time passes your criticality toward your work simply dissipates, gets forgotten, transforms into innocence and ageless fresh joy with lived experience. With the original condition absent, you’re free to experience the work and the world anew, those midnight hours of Helsinki turning into a dawn chorus in Tokyo. Sometimes the original condition is of course better and you’re right to leave it as it is, but here I found myself arriving in a future the seeds of which I’d planted all those years ago, without knowing how they might grow. What once had felt absent, was now starting to feel radiant.

Photography: Sebastian Mayer