i draw sound​

KEISUKE YOSHIZAWA

Composer and keyboardist working between cinematic ambient, contemporary electronic and modern classical idioms — built from piano, modular synthesis and processed texture. London-based since late 2024, with practice anchored across Japan, China and the United Kingdom.

I was born into the shitamachi — Tokyo’s old downtown, where the iki lives. Not elegance, not roughness, but the breath that sits between them: refined and unrefined together, polite and impolite together. A grandmother who knows your footsteps before you turn the corner. A fishmonger who calls you over with a voice that fills the street.

Wooden eaves and the warmth of strangers. Festival drums in summer. The shōtengai — the long covered street where every shopkeeper has their own song of greeting. The river embankment where you can lie down in the grass and watch the city move on without you. The park where the cherry blossoms come down for one week each year and then are gone.

I grew up there honestly. Open, unguarded, taking the place into me as it came. Before any keyboard, the neighbourhood was the first instrument. It taught me that listening is a form of belonging.

Then, from the start of primary school, every morning meant leaving the shitamachi for the heart of the city — to Ochanomizu Elementary in Kanda, the school where, more than a century before me, an eleven-year-old Natsume Sōseki had also been a pupil. The novelist who would one day sail for London on a government scholarship. A stone in the schoolyard still carries the opening line of his most famous novel.

Two Tokyos every day, for years. The trains became their own metronome. And in that long back-and-forth — between the warm shitamachi and the bright, restless centre — two things began to grow inside me at the same time: a quiet kind of melancholy, aishū, and a louder, restless thing I can only call madness. They lived together from the very beginning. They have never separated.

Years later, when I began to write music, the melancholy became piano. The madness became modular synthesis and processed texture. They are not two musics. They are the same one — the sound of two cities held inside one life.

Here time became a material; contradiction, a tempo.

Then a city across the sea.

The first time I sat down at a keyboard outside Japan and sounded a single chord — the moment the sound left my hands and entered a hall full of people whose first language was not mine — something in my body realised, for the first time: ah, this is overseas. Not the airport. Not the hotel. Not the language I could not speak. The sound was what told me. In a foreign city you hear yourself for the first time — your accent in your own playing, the things you took for granted that turn out to have been a country.

And then, in late 2024, London for real.

Stone and rain. Old music leaning against new music. Centuries piled like sediment under a single street. For a while I just listened — to the city, to the rooms I worked in, to my own hands learning the new room they were in. Then, at some moment I cannot date, the long accumulation — the shitamachi quiet, the central Tokyo speed, the foreign-stage chord — reached the threshold of what I could feel. Something that had been pressing against the inside of my chest for years finally broke open.

Here, finally, the silence I was born into returned — but in a city where I had to bring it myself.