I Leave You To It
“Every conversation is improvisation,” Kenichi Iwasa says. “We’re doing it right now.”
For Iwasa, improvisation is as ordinary as breathing. A room of strangers. A city entered too young. The fragile social choreography of listening, adapting, surviving. After leaving Japan for London as a teenager, moving through art school, underground dance music, squat raves, film, experimental collaboration, and decades inside the city’s improvisational underground, he has built a condition of radical presence.
Breath, brass, handmade horns, live electronics, obsolete machines, glitch, latency: in Iwasa’s work, the moment decides and the instrument leads.
This tension runs through Exotic Sin with Naima Karlsson, through the engineered vulnerability of Krautrock Karaoke, through his relationship to self-built instruments and disappearing live moments. What stays human in a culture defined by prediction, optimisation, constant visibility and the pressure to be endlessly reproducible?
At Nextones he brings that sensibility into direct relation with site, atmosphere and architecture. “The place will tell me,” he says. “Sound will arrive.” Preparation gives way to attention. Sound encounters a place on an unmediated register.
In conversation with NR, Kenichi Iwasa reflects on improvisation as survival skill, collective vulnerability, the strange intelligence of instruments, and the paradox of disappearing while leaving a trace inside somebody else’s recollection. “You are like my external hard drive,” he states. Perhaps that is also what live music asks of us: temporary custodianship of a moment that continues existing inside another body. Perhaps that is the felt truth of a life truly lived.
At Nextones this July, that philosophy will encounter a new landscape. Kenichi Iwasa will build a breath-led composition with a self-made hybrid instrument, folding wind, electronics, and field recordings into the village architecture.
You moved from Japan to London and have spent decades inside its experimental underground. How much of your creative restlessness do you attribute to that original displacement? Does being an outsider in a city help you perceive its structural beauty, or its contradictions, more clearly?
I’ve lived in London for thirty years. When I arrived, I wasn’t really a musician yet, I’d just graduated high school, I was still a kid, so I went to art school. I came from dance music; that was Breakbeat Hardcore, jungle, UK Garage, that kind of time. I was DJing. And then some friends invited me to come to a studio just to jam. I brought some stuff for them, and that’s how I originally started with music.
I began going to squat raves and gigs and late-night parties. It was a shocking experience. You go out and you see so many different kinds of people from different background .I came from a very monocultural place. I don’t think I’d ever spoken to someone from another country until I came here. My whole town, maybe there was one English teacher, that was it.
So coming to London was an enormous shift. And of course art school unlocked a new self, a new identity.
I appreciate certain Japanese values, like being considerate of other people’s space, paying attention to how your actions affect others, and having a strong sense of social awareness.. it’s not something I apply consciously in music, but sometimes I’ll be saying or doing something without thinking, and afterwards I realise: maybe that’s very Japanese haha. It just comes out naturally, I think. There are lot of advantage being Japanese musicians here in the music industries here in London. The Japanese musicians before us have already opened up a really good path for us.
Before finding your solo practice, you spent years moving through bands. What did that friction teach you about the conditions you actually need in order to work?
I played in so many bands, for about fifteen years, over many years. But it was never really suitable for me. A band isn’t for me.
Well, I’m happy to play in a band that performs improvised music, but I wouldn’t really enjoy playing the same songs over and over again.
You trained as an artist and were for some time known as a filmmaker. How did you eventually let music become the primary language, was there a moment, or did it happen gradually?
I was doing a lot of filming and music for a long time, artist talks, music videos, all of it together. But then things with music got busy, and I just stopped doing the film side. Some people still know me as a filmmaker actually. Not anymore, but yeah, I probably started out there. And then music just kind of took over completely.
You came to music through DJing, a practice built on selection, timing, and reading a room. What was it about not planning, about pure improvisation, that eventually became so essential to you?
What drew me in, especially coming from DJing, was that feeling of not knowing what’s coming next. I really enjoy that uncertainty. There’s a kind of tension in it that keeps you fully present and focused. You have to be tuned in to everything at once, staying open but also really aware of what’s happening in the moment.
I don’t come from a formal music background, so I never really started by learning pieces or practising in a structured way. I came into it through improvisation, just responding to sound and feeling rather than playing something already set.
Over time that way of working just became natural to me. It’s less about planning and more about trusting instinct, reacting to the room, and letting things unfold as they happen.
There is a paradox between the Japanese discipline you describe and the freedom of improvisation. Does that tension actually push you toward being more free, more present in the moment?
Yeah, definitely. I think that tension between discipline and improvisation is kind of the point, it doesn’t cancel itself out, it actually pushes things forward. For me, discipline is what creates the freedom. Improvisation doesn’t mean you simply turn up and perform without preparation. it comes from a lot of practic and thinking through different possible situations.
I’m often imagining gig scenarios and working through them in my head, so when I’m actually in the moment, I’m not starting from zero. I’ve done enough improvised shows over the years that it becomes more like a trained instinct. And that’s when you can actually be more present . because you’re not thinking so much, you’re just responding to what’s happening.
Your work often centres on the immediate friction between human breath and digital processing, feeding brass, flutes, handmade woodwinds, and electronics into unstable systems of live performance. Do you view your body as a direct extension of the machine, or is performance an active physical resistance against digital precision?
When the machine reacts unexpectedly, through glitch, latency, feedback, I don’t treat that as an error. It becomes a third presence in the room. That unpredictability is part of what I’m listening for.
I think what draws me to these unstable systems is the same thing that draws me to improvisation itself: you can’t fully predict or control the outcome. The body and the machine are in conversation, not in opposition. Sometimes the machine leads. Sometimes I push back against it. But neither is trying to win.
In Exotic Sin, your work with Naima Karlsson engages deeply with the legacy of Don and Moki Cherry, including the use of Don Cherry’s handbuild horn. How does working with instruments so embedded in personal, artistic, and cultural histories alter your relationship to improvisation?
I met Naima at a friend’s birthday party she’s the granddaughter of Don and Moki Cherry so you can see how there was already this connection and how I eventually came across Don’s horn through that.
We had so many mutual musical friends that we just kept missing each other for a long time. Back then she’d only just started playing piano, not long before we met.
It wasn’t until later, when she invited me out to Sweden where Don and Moki Cherry had lived, that I first came across the horn.
It’s incredible. We think it was made by a Japanese maker, probably in the late 60s or early 70s. It has Japanese characters on it, and even a name engraved: “Mako.” We can’t say for sure, but there’s something really special about it. I’ve never seen another horn like it, and I fell in love with it almost immediately.
That horn actually pushed me into making my own instrument. The sound is so unique, there’s really nothing else like it. I realised I’m more of a straightforward player, I’m more into tones and sound. If I can build something that feels completely mine, that becomes my thing, my weapon in the best possible sense.
Your practice frequently incorporates modified, hybrid, or self-built instruments. What does constructing or reshaping an instrument allow you to access that a finished, standardised instrument cannot? Is imperfection part of an instrument’s intelligence?
Right now I’m working with Charlie Hope, an incredible lighting designer and visual artist, to build my own horn. You might know his work he’s done lighting design for artists like Rebecca Salvadori, Tirzah, Lucy Railton, and a few others.
I really like the idea of collaborating with someone who isn’t a musician or an instrument builder, but who has a completely different way of thinking and really strong technical skills. For me, Charlie just felt like the right person for this. We’ve worked together before me playing music and him doing the lighting but this is the first time we’re actually building an instrument together and that’s what makes it feel special.
We just tested the first prototype and it sounded really good. I was quite moved by it, honestly. I’ve been wanting for a long time to have my own instrument and sound that nobody else has, and this feels like a real step in that direction.
There’s also something important for me about working with someone who isn’t from music. Charlie brings ideas I would never arrive at on my own, and that opens everything up in a really unexpected way. I like that sense of crossing disciplines it pushes things somewhere new.
Do you feel objects and instruments possess their own inherent desire for how they want to sound, or are they ultimately vessels for the performer’s immediate psychic state?
One of the most interesting things is you never really know how it’s going to sound until you actually play it. It makes me wonder if it already has its own voice before I even find it. At the same time, I’m constantly tweaking things, experimenting, trying to steer it towards what feels right, or what feels like its most natural way of speaking. It becomes a kind of dialogue between me and the instrument, always balancing intention and discovery. I say that because I’m working with something that doesn’t really exist yet, so it’s hard to define it in fixed terms. But I’m sure musicians can express so much just through how they approach an instrument, or even their state of mind in the moment. Even a single note can hold a lot of emotion.
You often work with deliberately limited older gear, including 1990s keyboards, alongside live electronics and digital systems. In a culture perpetually obsessed with novelty, what is the value of keeping one foot in the technical materiality of the recent past, and do you think the sound of an era can ever truly be separated from the people who made it?
I just love the sound of old keyboards like Casio keyboards, alongside analogue synths and drum machines. Maybe that’s because those were the tools I first had access to when I started making music.
We tend to define the sound of an era and try to recreate it, but it never quite feels fully achieved. I sometimes wonder if that’s because the energy of that time was simply different, something that can’t really be reproduced in the present.
I’m not really intentionally tied to older gear. I genuinely love new technology. It’s pretty amazing that we’ve reached a point where, with modern DAWs, you can record at a really high quality at home and build full layers of sound on your own, without needing big groups of musicians to bring an idea to life.
Through Krautrock Karaoke, you create a uniquely high-pressure environment, cross-generational groups of musicians, minimal preparation, little rehearsal, and an intentional proximity to uncertainty. Why is it important for you to strip away a musician’s rehearsed safety net?
Early in my career, I was lucky enough to perform with krautrock pioneers like Damo Suzuki, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, and Dieter Moebius. I was also deeply influenced by bands like CAN. That kind of music -simple, repetitive but powerful riffs, with lots of open space felt perfect for group playing, singing along, and layering instrumentation. It suggested a form that was structured enough to follow, but open enough for anyone to enter and contribute.
The idea of “Krautrock Karaoke” started partly as a joke. You can’t really “replicate” krautrock in the same way you would a pop song it’s already loose, open-ended, and resistant to fixed interpretation. So the idea of karaokeing it felt slightly absurd, because karaoke usually relies on clear songs with lyrics and structure. That tension was part of the humour, but also part of the concept.
It first began on my birthday about 13 years ago. From the start, the concept was simple: I would bring together a large number of musicians sometimes 50 to 80 people now days and announce the lineup only the night before. I speak to everyone individually rather than in group messages, and I never reveal the setlist in advance, because I don’t want people rehearsing or locking into expectations. If they knew what was coming, certain dynamics and certain combinations of people might never happen.
I also don’t fully announce the lineup until the night itself. That moment of revelation creates excitement, but also commitment: I tell musicians they’re free not to play if they don’t feellike it, yet they almost always do, because once they see who else is involved, they want to be part of it.
When everyone arrives, things are still quite unclear, and that’s usually where the conversation starts. People talk to each other, ask what’s going on, and try to make sense of it together. That moment feels really important because it naturally builds a sense of community before anyone even plays a note.
My job is basically just to set the scene and let it happen. When people don’t really know what’s coming, they tend to talk more openly, listen a bit better, and react to each other in real time instead of sticking to a plan cos there isn’t one.
Does genuine collective empathy on stage require shared vulnerability, or perhaps even a shared possibility of failure?
Not giving too much information keeps everyone in the space of what’s actually happening in the moment. There’s always a bit of anxiety, but I make that intentional because I want people to communicate with each other. I don’t want things to happen because of me, I want things to happen between them.
There’s a fine line between anxiety and excitement when you’re thrown on stage with a group of musicians to perform a set of some kind. People quickly start connecting in the way musicians naturally do, just through sound.
Sometimes I’ll step in to encourage musicians to get up on stage if it’s needed, but usually what happens is that people start watching each other play and feel that pull to join in. Some might be unsure at first, but by seeing it happen they start thinking, I can do something with
this. And then they end up on stage. Sometimes by the end, everyone has played, sometimes nobody wants to stop.
From those nights I can already tell who might become a future collaborator. A lot of connections have started exactly like that.
A significant part of your practice exists within the temporality of live performance, moments that are never formally tracked, archived, or translated into streaming culture. In an era that increasingly demands total documentation, how do you protect the integrity of the unrecorded moment?
I think about this a lot, the way everything now gets filmed, saved, documented. Even at concerts, it’s rare not to see screens everywhere. I feel like something gets lost in that. It’s not that I’m trying to protect the integrity of the unrecorded moment in some fixed way. If anything, I’m more interested in trying to preserve it in people’s memory instead. The people who were there.
Memory is like a pencil. Always changing. When you remember something, you’re remembering your version of it.And in a way, that feels closer to what a performance actually is than any fixed archive.
Do you feel a performance loses part of its ritual power the moment a camera, archive, or field recorder enters the room?
I’ve got hours and hours of recordings, tapes on tapes from over the years, but I don’t really like going back to them too much. There’s a bit of resistance there. Part of it is I don’t want to lose that sense of “present-ness,” like what I do only fully exists in the moment it happens.
At the same time, I’m aware those recordings were made without an audience, so I’m always asking myself how I can really prove my existence through that.
When I’m performing and everything clicks, I feel like I actually exist in that moment. Something just arrives. The intensity I have on stage is not something I have in everyday life. I don’t even fully understand that version of myself on stage. I just trust it because I can’t really imagine it from the outside, I only remember how it felt.
And that’s the strange thing. I don’t want to disappear, but when I do feel like I kind of disappear on stage, that’s actually what I’m aiming for in a way. To stay in that moment forever. The only trace I leave is in other people’s memory.
In a sense, you are my external hard drive.And maybe that’s what’s so powerful about music. There’s no certainty. You can’t hold it, you can’t touch it, it happens and then it’s gone. People who choose to work like that deserve a lot of respect, because they’re accepting something they can never fully own. But when live music really hits, you know it’s real.
Whether collaborating with artists like Beatrice Dillon, Maxwell Sterling, or Linder Sterling, you are often invited into very precise conceptual or sonic architectures. How do you navigate artistic ego when your role is not necessarily to dominate a space, but to introduce friction, unpredictability, or destabilisation into someone else’s system?
I’m really grateful for it, but also still a bit surprised by it. Everyone I’ve worked with has been very generous. I’m aware there’s a real risk for promoters when they book someone like me, especially someone with no recordings released. But I’ve been around long enough now that trust has built up over time with promoters and collaborators, and I think that’s really what’s kept things going for me.
At the same time, I know it’s not easy for a promoter to build an event around someone like me, so I don’t take that lightly. I feel pretty lucky in that sense.
But I also know the challenge is real. I don’t really see myself as a composer or songwriter with a clear vision or something specific I’m trying to impose. It’s kind of the opposite. Iusually go in with nothing fixed. I’m more of a responder. I try to fit into whatever is happening in the best way I can.
When someone starts playing, that first sound gives me the direction, and I build from there. It’s not about being recognised or standing out. I’m not in competition with anyone, I’m just in collaboration.
That also meant that doing solo work was quite difficult at the beginning, because there’s nothing to respond to. So I had to create ways of setting up that situation for myself. I started looping sounds and setting up playback in unpredictable ways, so I wouldn’t know exactly what would come back. That way I still had to react in real time. In a sense, I had to manufacture surprise.
You’ve contributed to sound works within gallery environments such as Lisson Gallery as well as intimate performance spaces like Cafe OTO. How does the geometry, silence, and physical distance of a white cube environment alter your relationship to sound compared to the close proximity of a basement venue?
I’m quite sensitive to all of that, actually. And that’s also why it works for me not to have a fixed set. It means I can adapt. Sometimes you show up with something prepared and the audience is really loud, or it’s a drunk crowd, or it’s a very serious, quiet one—and what you planned just doesn’t fit at all. But I can change things easily. I can just go with whatever is happening.
I end up interacting with so many different musicians and spaces. One thing I’ve noticed is that good musicians usually have amazing ears. It’s not really about how well you play, it’s about how well you listen.
That kind of patience, that level of listening, that’s what I’m always drawn to.
At Nextones, your work will bring breath, live electronics, handmade instrumentation, and architectural environment into direct conversation. When composing for a specific place rather than a conventional stage, do you feel you are composing with a site, or being composed by it?
I looked up the photos, it’s such a beautiful place. I’m really excited to be there. I’m pretty sure the space itself will give me ideas once I’m actually there. When I stand in it, something usually just comes. That’s how I prefer to work.
The only thing I can say in advance is that I’m premiering this horn me and Charlie Hope are making for this show at NEXTONEs, and I’m planning to bring that. But beyond that, I honestly don’t know yet. I don’t really want to decide too much beforehand. I’d rather wait and see what the space does, and what arrives in the moment.That feels like the right way for me to go into it.
Having spent decades embedded in London’s experimental ecosystem while carrying formative experiences from Japan, do you feel improvisation taps into specific geographical or subcultural memories, or does the act itself dissolve national identity and place into something fundamentally non-physical?
I think improvisation does carry geography and memory, but not in a fixed or literal way. Coming from Japan and then spending so many years in London’s experimental scene, those environments are definitely inside me. You can hear it in different instincts how I listen, how I respond, even how patient or direct I am in certain moments. So in that sense, yes, place does stay in the body and comes out in improvisation.
But at the same time, improvisation also dissolves a lot of that. When you’re actually inside it, you’re not really thinking “this is Japan” or “this is London.” You’re just responding to what’s happening in front of you. It becomes very immediate, very physical, and the identity side of it kind of drops away.
So I don’t think it’s either/or. It’s more like those memories and influences are always there, but improvisation doesn’t let them stay neatly separated. It mixes everything together in real time.
There’s a consistency between how you describe making music and how you describe moving through the world, staying open, staying present, resisting the automatic. Is that a philosophy you arrived at consciously, or something the practice taught you over time?
I think it’s important to live the way you perform. If I perform in a certain way but I don’t actually live like that, there’s a contradiction. It doesn’t really feel convincing when it comes across. People are not stupid. They can sense whether you mean it or not.
I want to stay aware of how society is moving, all the time. I don’t want to be the kind of artist who makes work in a sealed room, only surrounded by people who think the same way. As artists, we have a tool to communicate with a much wider range of people, and I think it’s really important to stay aware of what’s happening in the world, to keep updated, and to reflect that in what we do, especially for people who don’t have the same access or perspective.
If you only exist inside your own Instagram algorithm, it can start to feel like that’s the whole world. But it’s not.
So I try to stay in ordinary life as much as I can, just walking around, working alongside people. That’s where I get most of my inspiration from.I think music, or sound more broadly, is one of the most powerful art forms because you can’t really touch it or fully own it in the way you can with something like a painting. It just goes straight into you.
When it hits, it can feel like something you didn’t even know was there gets brought back up. It’s very physical, but it also moves you emotionally in a really direct way.
At Nextones, your work will bring breath, live electronics, handmade instrumentation, and architectural environment into direct conversation. When composing for a specific place rather than a conventional stage, do you feel you are composing with a site, or being composed by it?
I looked up the photos, it’s such a beautiful place. I’m really excited to be there. I’m pretty sure the space itself will give me ideas once I’m actually there. When I stand in it, something usually just comes. That’s how I prefer to work.
The only thing I can say in advance is that I’m premiering this horn me and Charlie Hope are making for this show at NEXTONEs, and I’m planning to bring that. But beyond that, I honestly don’t know yet. I don’t really want to decide too much beforehand. I’d rather wait and see what the space does, and what arrives in the moment.That feels like the right way for me to go into it.
Having spent decades embedded in London’s experimental ecosystem while carrying formative experiences from Japan, do you feel improvisation taps into specific geographical or subcultural memories, or does the act itself dissolve national identity and place into something fundamentally non-physical?
I think improvisation does carry geography and memory, but not in a fixed or literal way. Coming from Japan and then spending so many years in London’s experimental scene, those environments are definitely inside me. You can hear it in different instincts how I listen, how I respond, even how patient or direct I am in certain moments. So in that sense, yes, place does stay in the body and comes out in improvisation.
But at the same time, improvisation also dissolves a lot of that. When you’re actually inside it, you’re not really thinking “this is Japan” or “this is London.” You’re just responding to what’s happening in front of you. It becomes very immediate, very physical, and the identity side of it kind of drops away.
So I don’t think it’s either/or. It’s more like those memories and influences are always there, but improvisation doesn’t let them stay neatly separated. It mixes everything together in real time.
There’s a consistency between how you describe making music and how you describe moving through the world, staying open, staying present, resisting the automatic. Is that a philosophy you arrived at consciously, or something the practice taught you over time?
I think it’s important to live the way you perform. If I perform in a certain way but I don’t actually live like that, there’s a contradiction. It doesn’t really feel convincing when it comes across. People are not stupid. They can sense whether you mean it or not.
I want to stay aware of how society is moving, all the time. I don’t want to be the kind of artist who makes work in a sealed room, only surrounded by people who think the same way. As artists, we have a tool to communicate with a much wider range of people, and I think it’s really important to stay aware of what’s happening in the world, to keep updated, and to reflect that in what we do, especially for people who don’t have the same access or perspective.
If you only exist inside your own Instagram algorithm, it can start to feel like that’s the whole world. But it’s not.
So I try to stay in ordinary life as much as I can, just walking around, working alongside people. That’s where I get most of my inspiration from.I think music, or sound more broadly, is one of the most powerful art forms because you can’t really touch it or fully own it in the way you can with something like a painting. It just goes straight into you.
When it hits, it can feel like something you didn’t even know was there gets brought back up. It’s very physical, but it also moves you emotionally in a really direct way.
Credits
All images courtesy of the artist.
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