Sasha Frere-Jones on Ryuichi Sakamoto [Paywall]

I said I wanted to make records again but was nervous because it had been almost ten years since I’d been in the studio. How does one make a good record?
‘Make a bad record,’ he said, and laughed. ‘I do it all the time.’

Putting aside the humble nature of Sakamoto’s response above, his simple advice to “make a bad record” as a creative tactic to circumvent the anti-creative judgmental power of the ego, is concise and masterful – if you’re worried about the quality of what you create, just make bad things. They likely won’t be bad for long.

The short profile of a music maestro from which this quote is pulled, peppered with first-hand conversations with the maestro himself, is a cracking little introduction to his work.