A .wav of Solace

Nick Dwyer has been in hot pursuit of the people who make music since he was fourteen, when he started working in radio in New Zealand. The chase ran from club nights at home to a baile funk party in a Rio favela, on through Kingston and Ghana and Trinidad with a camera crew, and eventually onto Japanese night buses with almost no money, hunting jazz cafés town by town. It delivered him to a window in a cheap inn in Hiraizumi, in northern Japan, where the frogs and the birds and the insects started up together and moved him to tears. 

Settle into the wild and wondrous journey that came out of all of it, before A Century in Sound, Insect Musicians and Music for the Gods play across three nights at Wonderfruit in December.

WF: Your brother sent a Game Boy back to New Zealand from Japan in the early nineties, then a Super Famicom, and the soundtracks were what got you. Japanese sound reached you two decades before you reached Japan. What was your mental picture of the country, and how did it hold up when you finally got there?

ND: In 2014 I made a documentary series about the history of Japanese video game music, and how impactful it was on all of us. One of the main points is that that music was such a big part of our childhoods, but we weren't thinking in terms of a human behind the music back in those days. It came out of the machine. But those melodies were imprinted on us.

It was only really later on in life, when I was making a TV series about music culture around the world, and when it was time to do the Tokyo episode, I was like, okay, what Japanese influence has had such a big influence, and I thought, I need to know who made the music for those video games. I interviewed two legendary Japanese video game composers, Yoko Shimomura, who did Street Fighter II, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, and a man named Hip Tanaka, one of the most legendary Nintendo composers. He was really into reggae, and he was like, I was trying to make Sly and Robbie rhythms, but with the limitations of the chip. It just blew my mind. You're not even thinking about the human behind the music, let alone what they're influenced by when you're a kid. Little did we know that these incredible Japanese men and women were listening to Japanese jazz fusion, or listening to reggae, or listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra, and they were putting it into the video games. It was almost like a message in a bottle. We didn't realise it until later on.

But it wasn't just about my brother sending a Game Boy back and the Super Famicom. My older brother and sister were eight, nine years older than me and my sister, so they left the house to go to university, and we had two spare bedrooms. In the early nineties a lot of Japanese families were sending their kids to New Zealand and Australia to do homestay, so we started having Japanese homestay three times a year, from the age of eleven.

I just started to have a lot of contact with Japanese people, and they would all bring with them their Game Boys or their MiniDisc players. From that age I was just like, Japan is living in the future. Japanese design aesthetics, the way character design, packaging design, all of it was just so new and so incredible. From fourteen, fifteen, I started working in radio, and I worked at a record store at the same time, and because I was studying Japanese at school and I was very passionate about Japanese culture, I started to always look for Japanese music to play on the radio. Fell in love and supported a lot of Japanese music. It all started then, and only got bigger and bigger, the more I started travelling to Japan, and then living here. For me it's just endless inspiration.

The West loves to portray a lot of cliches about Japan over and over. You'll see Shibuya Crossing, you'll see weird Japan, Vice would just do all these terrible documentaries about Yakuza or whatever. But that's not the Japan that I know. The Japan that I know is filled with wonderful, passionate, incredible people who have dedicated their lives to one thing, and anything that is culture from outside especially, they love it so much that they want to present it in the most authentic way to their customers. That's what resonates with me. That's what I've fallen in love with, and that's the Japan that I want to show to the world.

WF: You were on radio at fourteen, then presenting music TV, then making a series where each episode was a different country. Walking into all those scenes as a visitor, what were you chasing?

ND: I was chasing the thrill of hearing new music. That's been at the core of what I do my whole life. Just getting goosebumps when I hear something new that makes my brain go, what the hell is this. And I realised that there is nothing more incredible than hearing regional music in its rightful context.

In the 2000s I was working for a platform called the Red Bull Music Academy, and through that, in 2002, I got to travel to Brazil for the first time. I went to a baile funk party in the favelas and it changed my life. Back then I was a drum and bass DJ, I played in the clubs, and at that time there was a Brazilian flavour to drum and bass, DJ Marky, DJ Patife, that was really popular around the world, and I loved those records. To be able to go to parties in Brazil, and hear homemade records played to homemade audiences, and see the response from crowds, that became such a thrill for me. The following year I was in South Africa, I got to experience their local music culture, it was called kwaito at the time, kind of preceded gqom and amapiano.

Ever since I was doing radio as a teenager, and then I was a music TV presenter, because I'm doing voice breaks all the time, I'm always looking for facts behind the music, because I always need to give context. That just became built in for me. When new music comes into my life and I love it, I've got to read up about it. I need to know who made it, why they made it, what country. Music on its own is wonderful, but when it gets given a geographic location and a date, all of a sudden it takes on a whole new meaning.

The TV show I started making in the mid-2000s was about that. It was exploring global culture and social history through the lens of music. I did that over the course of about six years and travelled to many, many countries. It was a gift, to be able to interview some of the most legendary people in the history of music, and to get that pass where, because you're going with the musicians and they're taking you to these areas, I got to witness musical performances that other people don't really get to see. From Kingston, Jamaica, to Rio, to Ghana, to Argentina. So many incredible musical memories. But that's still at the core of what I do. I'm still chasing new music, and all I want to do is be inspired by something to the point where I'm obsessed and just want to share it with the world. That's very much what A Century in Sound has been, and now Insect Musicians is.

WF: Through all of that chasing, all those goosebumps, what did you end up finding in yourself?

ND: If we want to talk inner growth, I have to talk about A Century in Sound. I started in radio and TV very young, and simultaneously I got into club culture, rave culture, when I was fifteen. And all of the trappings that come with it, of the culture of the nineties. Which was a culture of excess, and especially as a working club DJ, with such proximity to drugs and alcohol always. Especially in New Zealand, we have a binge drinking, getting wasted culture that was just caked into it.

I moved to Japan for a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons was that I wanted to fall in love with music again and have a completely pure relationship with music again, that was untainted by drugs and alcohol. I had been deeply involved with club culture for more than twenty years at the front lines. I worked in record stores, I promoted parties, I promoted festivals, I was a working DJ. I was looking for something else, not just on a musical level. Spiritually, I felt very empty.

Without even realising it, when I came to Japan in 2014 with this purpose to eventually move here, I stumbled across this ongaku kissa culture purely by chance. And without even realising it, it was exactly what my heart and my soul was craving. Just these beautiful, beautiful cafes where everyone sits in silence, everyone's just drinking coffee, there's no booze served. And everyone is listening to recorded music in the most beautiful way over these incredible sound systems. It became such a thrill for me, such a joy for me. And I wanted to dive deep into it. And I went all the way down the rabbit hole.

After eleven years, we should be able to start sharing. We have been sharing some of it with people, but hopefully A Century in Sound will be out either later this year or early next year, so everyone can see the fruits of that ten-year-plus obsession.

WF: Obsession is the word you keep reaching for, and it's the word your subjects would use about themselves too. What does it actually mean to you, and what is it about obsessed people that pulls you towards them?

ND: There's a spectrum. A friend of mine always loves this quote, I can't remember the origin of the quote, but eventually every virtue can become a vice and every vice can become a virtue. With obsession, there's healthy obsession, there's highly functioning obsession, and then there's negative obsession. It depends what you're obsessing about.

What I've realised about myself, especially through the process of doing this project, because it's eleven years, money ran out a long time ago. I haven't taken any money from this project, so I've just worked for free for nearly five years, and I had to put my own money into this, because I really believe in it. I really believe that the world needs to see these people. I love these people so much that I want everyone to know that they exist, and that people like that exist, and that this culture exists. Eleven years ago especially, no one was talking about listening bars or listening cafes or nothing, and obviously over the last ten years it's grown around the world, but what is happening around the world is completely different from what's happening here. So I really want people to know what is at the heart of this culture.

I use the word ongaku kissa because that means music cafes or listening cafes, and that's the terminology used at the beginning of the culture, and everything that followed is all part of that. Jazz kissa, rock kissa, rock bar, noise bar, and your modern listening bar. I want people to see the series and realise that these people are all about community and love, and it's not about commerce. No one is going, I'm going to make a million bucks, let's open a jazz kissa. Their obsession is the music that they love, and they're obsessed with sound, and creating an environment where their customers can experience recorded music in a way that feels as close to the live experience as possible. That's their obsession, and they haven't given up on that. I just think that needs to be applauded.

My form of obsession is, I love these people so much, I believe in the film so much, and I believe in its power to resonate with such a wide audience, despite what I keep getting told by industry people over the last ten years of, oh, it's a bit niche, I don't know who would be into this. But it's for everyone. It was made for everybody that loves music, everybody that loves history, and everybody that has been charmed or dreams of being charmed by Japan. And I know that there's millions and millions. Once people actually sit down with it, especially when we've been able to show it in theatres, everyone has been really, really moved.

My obsession is just not giving up. Eleven years. At certain points it's ruined my life. I haven't been able to move on to other projects mentally, because I feel like I'm not doing enough. But I'm just determined to tell the story to the world. No money, no visas, just broke. Moments where you're like, I'm forty years old, what am I doing. Having to borrow some money off friends. In those dark days, all I need to do is go back to Eigakan or step into Lion and feel my soul get filled again. And then I get reminded, no, I have to do this. There's a reason why the world needs to see this, and we're getting close to the end.

I never really thought of myself as obsessed. I thought of myself as just potentially has ADHD, definitely diagnosed now. But now I realise, look, I don't want to say, oh, I'm an artist, or even put myself in the same category as artist, but I feel like through the course of doing this project I am getting close to understanding what it means to be an artist, which is being obsessed with an idea. You have something in your head, a creative idea that you just have to get out into the world, and you'll do whatever it takes to get it out into the world. I think that's what a lot of true art is.

WF: These are private rooms, and people who had never let a camera in. Do you feel like you owe them something?

ND: I feel like I owe them everything. You've got to understand that I visited these places and became a regular for years and years before I even asked them if I could film.

With Lion it was a couple of years. I was living around the corner, I was going there like every day of the week. It's quite a heavy area, if anyone knows Shibuya and Dogenzaka, and that whole love hotel area, and it's just not good for the soul. I was in a share house there and it was just a weird period. I'd just moved to Japan for the first time, and nothing can prepare you for how difficult it is when you move to a new city, country and culture as an adult. I was thirty-five years old, and there's all these cliques, and making friends is like dating. Just finding your way, man, it's overwhelming.

I was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time. I was thirty-five and I wanted to get sober, and I moved to a big confusing city trying to make new friends where every friendship is forged over alcohol and people think you're weird because you don't drink. It was a crazy, crazy time. In my solitude, the place where I got a reprieve from the anxiety in my brain was Lion. I would step in there and the noise, the anxiety, would stop. So it became a place of calm, tranquility, healing. But also it became a place where I was able to get an education in classical music. I came to understand classical music through it.

After two years I finally asked. I know they'd never let anyone film there. And they let me. With Eigakan, I was going there for five years before I asked Yoshida. These people trusted me, a foreigner, with telling their story. That to me is the greatest honour, and I made a decision that because of that, I had to do my very, very best to present their spaces in the most authentic way possible. A large part of that decision was that all of the music that you hear in the place is recorded through their systems, and all of the records come on and off in real time, just how it feels in the space. Everything's flowing in real time. At the end of the day, everything was trying to make the viewer feel like they were sitting in there. That's what we wanted to achieve. It made things very difficult with all the music licensing, which is a saga that is ongoing to this day, but I'm working through it.

The fact that they allowed me to do this, they let me into their lives, I don't take that lightly, and I'm forever indebted to them. They all love the films. It's just been a long journey getting them out into the world, and I want to do good on my word. Some of them I promised more than ten years ago that we'd do this.

It's worth noting, because this is Wonderfruit, that the first person I told, I want to make a film about your life, was Masaru at Nightingale. That was 2014. He was like my big brother. We had crazy fallouts because he just thought I was another person lying to him. He couldn't understand. We were able to shoot and edit his film in 2017, and more than anybody, I want to do good on my promise to him that we'll get it out in the world. The world premiere of the Nightingale episode is happening at Wonderfruit, and we've got an evening of programming of artists that are Nightingale-adjacent. I'm really, really pleased that finally we get to start screening the Nightingale episode, because it's a very special story about a very special human being.

WD: Curiosity looks like the engine in your films. What does it feel like in year six of an eleven-year project?

ND: I'm lucky in that I'm not making investigative journalism. I don't make films trying to uncover an evil of the world. All of the films that I make, I make about music and human beings that are connected to that music that I love. And I love these people and I love this culture. Even though for a lot of people you just go, oh, it's too difficult, they give up, you lose your motivation. For me, every single day I have to make sometimes hundreds of decisions related to A Century in Sound, and it just moves it forward.

I didn't know ten years ago how to get global streaming for a series, and it turns out no one makes independent series, because no one's crazy, they make independent films. I've just learned all these lessons along the way, met people along the way. It's been ten years of growth. Also, in all the hardest times, I grew more as an individual, as a human being, than I ever did when shit was going great.

What does curiosity look like in year six? Luckily for me, every time I step into these places it's different. I'm hearing new music, I'm excited about new things. And the last couple of years especially, we've been able to screen it at film festivals around the world, culminating with London. We sold out the Barbican four times, and that was just a dream. At all the film festivals you're targeting a film-adjacent cinema audience, but what happened in London is we collaborated with a number of the top listening bars, Spiritland, Jumbi, Spacetalk, a whole bunch of others, and we were able to get the word out about the film to the music heads. The crowd was just full of people. More than 2,000 people came. Barbican said they could have probably done two more screenings, but they didn't think it was appropriate. Let's just leave it at four. That was so beautiful, to be in a room full of people that loved and cared about the music and the people on the screen as much as I did.

WF: How do you find the line between respect, empathy and truth with your subjects? Do you work that out with them, or on your own?

ND: With A Century in Sound I got to know these people so well. I interviewed them so many times. I got to know their stories. Everything, all the story is them. There's only two things where you could maybe feel the hand of the director. That is in the love that you can probably feel that I have for them. And then secondly, I realised pretty early on that you can't tell the history of the culture without telling the actual history. They're intertwined. So I very much wanted to tell a social history through their own personal stories. Obviously that structure is my construct, but all the stories are their own. It was gleaned from hours and days and weeks and years of getting to know these people.

WF: Insect Musicians came to you differently. Where did it start?

ND: I used to just get on the night bus and travel all around. You get on the night bus for like ten dollars and go anywhere in the main island of Japan. I used to have very little money, but I just stayed in cheap ryokan, and I'd go explore jazz kissa and other music spots all around Japan.

I was going to this legendary jazz kissa up north called Basie, and I was in this tiny town of Hiraizumi, and it was rainy season. I was staying at a really cheap ryokan, a Japanese inn, and the rain stopped. I opened my window, and then all of a sudden I could hear the frogs, and then some birds, and then some insects, and there's other insects, and before I knew it it was this orchestra of small creatures. And it moved me to the point of tears, it was so fucking beautiful. I couldn't recall the last time I'd heard that, if ever, maybe when I was a kid. It really deeply moved me. I've spent this whole lifetime chasing music of the world, but some of the most beautiful is nature giving it to us right there.

I started researching deep about the history of nature as music in Japan. I found this really beautiful entry in a guidebook written in 1930, talking about the sixties in the same way that we talk about the 1960s, so they were talking about the 1860s, and it was talking about these insect listening festivals that were happening in the Edo period. I started researching those, and I found the one town that still did it. I turned up in that small town and started meeting all these people, all these amazing people, and someone would be like, oh, you're interested in insects, you should go and see Mori-san at such and such, and you go see Mori-san, he'd be like, you should go see Kitahara-san. I met all these amazing people just through this event, in one twenty-four hours of being in this tiny town. It got me deeper into the insect listening world, met all these wonderful characters, and then the next year went back to film it.

WF: In Insect Musicians the landscape works almost like brushwork. When did the environment stop being backdrop and start being a character?

ND: The environment is the character. I heard this word the other day, shadow biome, which is basically, there's all of these complete ecosystems of creatures, even bacteria, that are unseen with the human eye. And the insects have their own little world. We hear them, but they exist all around us. I love that.

One of the big things that we wanted to do was we shot with a probe lens. We wanted to shoot insects big, so you're in their world. The key thing is to give the sense that humans and insects coexist, they live side by side every day. And those landscapes are the characters too, because that's the habitat of these insects.

WF: There's a shot where a man is holding a suzumushi and birds lift off behind him. What's your editing process, and how much room do you leave for something like that?

ND: With every single film I've done, I do so much research on it. I write it before we've shot it, and then we have a shooting script, and then obviously, because it's documentary, you should always leave space for the magic to happen, which is the birds and all those things. But I know the structure and the flow, and I already have an idea in my head of the music and how that influences the pacing and the rhythm. When we get into the edit, because I'll do hour-long, hour-and-a-half-long interviews with people, it's about getting all the best interview there that tells the story.

I'm not, and I never have been, a documentary maker where you just shoot a whole lot of footage and then go into the edit and look at it. That, to me, sounds like a nightmare. I've researched it so well, I know the story I want to tell, so that we can just focus on getting beautiful shots. Especially working with Tim, the idea has always been to create a documentary that's A, sonically immersive, and B, feels like cinema. You apply the same love and care as you would in cinema narrative. When you get into real situations, you let yourself go with it and see what happens. We know where we're going, we know what we're doing, but always leave room for magic, because then the magic happens.

WF: You've said what's missing from the cut right now is the sound design. Who are you doing it with, and what's the brief?

ND: The cameraman is Tim Flower. Sound design, we're going to be working with Alan Maudsley. I'm going to be working with him for the first time. He's a big music head. We got introduced through a mutual friend who lived in London. Alan was the mix engineer for a lot of big music for Ninja Tune artists in the 2000s in London, most notably Roots Manuva, on his famous album Run Come Save Me. We haven't done sound design yet, so I can't tell you yet how it's going to go, but I'm pretty excited about it. We'll be doing that in two weeks' time.

What we want to be doing is enhance what is there, and really bring out certain sounds. A lot of the time we're in an environment recording, but we're recording footsteps, there's all these other sounds going, and then our sound recordist separately would go and get other sounds. There's so much work to do with the sound, it's almost like another job, so it's separate to the editing.

Essentially, the brief is, in the same way that I've had moments listening to insects where it's given me goosebumps, I want to give the audience goosebumps. I want those moments, especially in the park with Madoka, the haiku poet, when she's listening. I want the audience to feel what she's feeling and get goosebumps hearing these insects also.

Dwyer screens one film a night across three nights at Wonderfruit this December, each paired with a music program developed in collaboration with the Wonderfruit team.

Insect Musicians
Thursday, 3 December, Forest Stage

Insect Musicians follows the people who keep singing insects in Japan, a practice with roots in the Edo period, and the small circle who still gather each year to listen. Wonderfruit became involved while the film was still in production, helping support its completion. At The Fields, it screens outdoors at Forest Stage, where the sounds of living insects may mingle with those captured on film.

Featured artists: Masayoshi Fujita, Manami Kakudo, Yuka Mizuhara and Akaihirume

A Century in Sound: Episode 4 Nightingale
Friday, 4 December, Enfold

The story of a man named Masaru and the extraordinary room he built. Dwyer first told Masaru he wanted to make a film about his life in 2014, before filming and editing it in 2017. Nearly a decade later, he fulfills that promise as Nightingale receives its world premiere at Wonderfruit.

Featured artists: Carl Stone, Eli Keszler, Jim O’Rourke & Eiko Ishibashi

Geinoh Yamashirogumi
Sunday, 6 December, Baan Bardo

Known internationally for the Akira soundtrack, Geinoh Yamashirogumi brings together musicians with people from disciplines including neuroscience and ethnomusicology. At its heart is a belief that human beings carry latent abilities preserved within folk traditions around the world. Built around the collective’s 1986 album Ecophony Rinne, the film was commissioned by Wonderfruit.

Featured artists:  Mong Tong, Howie Lee

WF: There are these recurring sounds through the offline edit that land like a kind of glittery nostalgia. Where did the music come from?

ND: Music is me and my music-making partner, Devin. We have a project called Rush to the Unknown. He's my best friend. He does all of the music that I do for my little doc projects. We work so closely together. I work as a musical director, but we also produce music together.

During the pandemic he just happened to be in the small town that my parents live in when I was trapped, and that's how one of our cassettes we released a couple of years ago came about. But this project is us going back to our teenage years. We were really into jungle and having our minds blown by jungle, but putting in all the influences that I picked up in Japan, and he's picked up over the last twenty, thirty years, especially the last ten years here. We're also very influenced by environmental music, Japanese ambient. For the music for Insect Musicians we thought, well, why don't we do it ourselves? So all the music that you hear is me and Devin. It's a pleasure to work with him because you get exactly what you envision.

That theme, we've called it The Procession of the Crickets. It has this kind of, if you imagine music made by insects, but it's like two hundred years old.

WF: That was the brief?

ND: That was it, one hundred per cent. Let's make music like if the insects were making music, but we're in the Edo period.

WF: How did you find the people in the film? The collectors, the poet.

ND: Most of them I met in person when I went to this small town called Itami in Hyogo. I went to the insect hearing festival in 2024, and then I went back in 2025 and filmed it. So I'd met a lot of them, and then through them they would mention other people. The Japan-wide insect appreciation, insect singing society is quite small. Everyone knows everyone, so I was able to connect with a lot of people.

I knew I wanted a haiku poet, and Madoka is a well-known poet. I've read many interviews with her and I love what she said. She's from a place called Yugawara in the Izu Peninsula, which holds a very special place in my heart. I even have a Yugawara keychain. So naturally I had to ask her if she would be in the film.

WF: How did Wonderfruit come about, and how did you meet Pete?

ND: We put out a film last year with Yussef Dayes, the UK jazz drummer, which was a hybrid live performance, a musical, cultural, spiritual journey through Japan, called Yussef Dayes: Live in Tokyo. Pete had seen that and loved it. And it was Nick Luscombe who does MSCTY. It came up in conversation, and Nick Luscombe was like, oh, I know that guy. And he connected me and Pete.

Pete is just such a music head, and is so passionate about music and culture, and it was incredible to meet him. We got on immediately. I sent him the links to A Century in Sound. He watched that and loved it so much. He wanted to get me out to Wonderfruit last year for the anniversary, and maybe film something, but for a number of reasons I couldn't make it out, and I really wanted to, because I still had never been, and I've been hearing about how incredible it is for such a long time. One of my best friends in life is the trombone player in Fat Freddy's Drop, and I remember him telling me about Wonderfruit from, I think, the first or the second edition. So many friends that I have go and play every year. I was kicking myself that I couldn't go.

Pete and I just had more conversations. We were aligned on so many different things that we believe very strongly in and that we're motivated by outside of just music. We quickly realised that there was a potential to collaborate on a bigger scale. Wonderfruit helped support Insect Musicians, which was already in production. He loved the whole concept. And then they commissioned the third film that we're going to do, because we're presenting three films, which is about the legendary Japanese group called Geinoh Yamashirogumi, who famously made the soundtrack to Akira, but they are so much more than that.

I'm so happy that the universe decided for me and Pete to meet, because this collaboration is so meaningful and I know it's going to be just the beginning. Pete and I share this vision of what we want to do, which is to bring people together through the power of cinema and sound. It's as simple as that.

After the last two years of trying to get A Century in Sound sold, the path for an indie filmmaker is that you hope and pray you get into a film festival, and hope and pray you get a sales agent, and hope and pray that you get sold to a streaming company or a network. I want people to experience these films in a real environment, together, and over incredible speakers. I want people to get moved. That's what I want for these films. There's a better way to present these kinds of films to the world, and I think this is just the beginning of what's going to be a wonderful collaboration with Wonderfruit, where we start bringing cinema and sound to people across Asia, and hopefully the world.

WF: Insect Musicians screens at Forest Stage. Outdoors, at night, in Chonburi, where the insects will be audible over the soundtrack.

ND: I love it, I can't wait, I really cannot wait. Just to be able to go to Wonderfruit would be an incredible thing, but to be able to present three separate works over three separate nights, and have music programming attached to that, is such an honour. And I'm so fucking excited, if you excuse my language.

WF: The third night is the Geinoh Yamashirogumi film. Talk me through what that is.

ND: That's the Geinoh Yamashirogumi film. They're this legendary Japanese organisation, famous for doing the soundtrack to Akira, but they've been going essentially since the sixties and early seventies. They're an organisational group built up of neuroscientists and researchers and ethnomusicologists and people from all walks of life, who have been searching for something outside of Western music and Western structures that have been forced upon the whole world, really, especially when it comes to music. They strongly believe that human beings have latent abilities that are almost laying dormant, and there's all of these old folk traditions, music traditions, that villages and communities around the world, be it in the rainforests in Central Africa, Bulgarian choir, especially the Balinese kecak, that bring people together in really beautiful ways. Every year they perform an amazing kecak festival. And incredible gamelan, and so much more.

So it's a film about them, and their history, and about music. In 1986 they recorded one of the most incredible sounding records in the world, called Ecophony Rinne, and the film was based on that. Hopefully it'll be another one of these sonically immersive cinematic experiences that puts Tokyo, the living organism of Tokyo, at the centre of it. And the music programming around that is other music that is linked to spiritual, devotional, the kind of music that induces trance-like states, which helps you to connect to the gods.

WF: Are you involved in the music programming as well?

ND: Absolutely, working closely with the team on that, and the team are just such a joy to work with. Phuong, Kyle, all of them. I'm really grateful, and I feel blessed that these people are now my friends. Everyone loves music and has the right attitudes, and they're just a pleasure to work with.

WF: What are you listening to right now that has nothing to do with any of the films?

ND: Because I've travelled extensively through the world, I have records from my collection. I listen to a lot of African music, from around Africa. In the morning, if it's a grey day, instant sunshine is Nigerian highlife, or big Cameroonian bikutsi, or even some Congolese music like Franco. Or else I listen to some samba. I listen to sunshine music from around the world.

I go deep on whatever I'm listening to for work, so I've been listening to a lot of Geinoh Yamashirogumi. But I'm always listening to all these records from all around the world that bring me sunshine and joy. And at the moment, even though I can't really afford to, because me and my partner have just put out a new record on a Berlin-based label, I'm constantly listening back to lots of mid-nineties radio shows by a DJ called Fabio. Fabio and Grooverider. That whole mid-nineties, very deep musical jungle sound was just such a big part of my teenage years, and all of that music still holds the same fire it did back then. I listen to a lot of ambient stuff.

All those records have got a story to them. I can remember exactly where I found it, in a market in Nairobi or something, and the waft of smoked meats in the air. They're all documents from my travels and I love them.

WF: Your films are about people who organise their lives around a sound most people walk past. Is that the thread?

ND: No, not really. I mean, definitely I've spent my life documenting music culture that mainstream, especially in New Zealand at the time, wouldn't have covered. I was doing this TV show where each episode was a new country. I'd go to Trinidad and Tobago and introduce people to calypso and soca. So yeah, always introducing an audience to music they've never heard of before. But just showing them how beautiful the world is, showing everyone how beautiful the world really is, especially parts of the world that the West would have you believe are dysfunctional, downtrodden, all of that.

Maybe at the core of what I do now as a documentary maker, I'm really interested in underdogs and anti-heroes. I love people that society wouldn't necessarily class as cool, or were they being held up. And I want to show the world that these people are fucking incredible, and they deserve the highest pedestal possible.