TB: J-Rock, along with visual kei, was my first foray into the more peculiar side of Japanese music, and when I think of its sound and aesthetic, it’s totally different than what you are doing. But I’m curious, were you ever involved in this scene or is there any aspect of it that influenced group A?
T: No way. I have always hated that scene, I still do. Although I understood the whole scene better when I got into dark wave, before that I never even thought their influences were Eastern music at all.
S: I used to listen to those kinds of bands when I was 14. It's like my guilty pleasure but it has nothing to do with it as group A.
TB: I noticed your live sets are accompanied by some trippy visuals, and even your presence on the stage is a performance itself. How do you see your work: is it an art statement or more like an expression of yourself?
T: Art is nothing more than just the way I choose to express myself to the public. It all comes naturally from inside myself.
S: We express forth our feelings which come from deep inside ourselves. It might be an art statement as well - for example when we feel the inconsistencies on the scheme of society, we create music or we perform very honest and straight to the doubt or sadness. I think that it becomes a statement to society through our expression.
TB: Do you feel that coming from Japan, a country well known for its advances in technology, influenced your sound or your approach to making music?
T: I don't really think so, as I have always listened to European music since I was young. I actually only started listening to Japanese music after I moved back to Tokyo from London, but that's also "European influenced" music. The thing is, we weren't making music at the beginning. It's hard to explain but our gigs were more focused on performance and the sounds didn't matter. But making sounds(or rather noise) was a big part of the performance. We could even hardly play any of our own instruments for a while, we didn't really know what we were doing. Perhaps that's why it was so much fun, and that was the whole point. We were like three babies screaming, trying to express our feelings without knowing how to speak.
S: Technology is not a big deal. We obviously owe much to the development of technology - group A wouldn't exist if there were no Made-in-Japan synthesizers and pedals. Technology is more likely-one of the choices to live the modern life to me. Never got influenced by that. We are more influenced by the myths, various religions and indigenous faiths of Japan.