Masayoshi Fujita at Wonderfruit: The Maestro of Silence, Nature and the Universe
This is an exclusive Thailights interview. Ahead of his anticipated return to Wonderfruit Festival this December, acclaimed Japanese composer Masayoshi Fujita sits down with us to discuss silence, nature, and his upcoming Erased Tapes release. Read on for a profound look into an artist turning the space between notes into an entire universe.
For anyone who has ever stepped onto the sun-baked fields of Siam Country Club during Wonderfruit, the festival can feel like an overwhelming sensory rush. Between the kinetic art installations, the dust swirling under the Thai sun, and the relentless pulse of 4/4 basslines echoing across the landscape, the festival operates at a very high frequency. Yet, tucked into this year's lineup is an artist whose entire craft is built on doing the exact opposite. Japanese composer and vibraphone master Masayoshi Fujita does not make music designed to dominate a room. Instead, his work asks you to lean in, hold your breath, and listen to the space hiding between the notes.
Ahead of his upcoming performance at Wonderfruit this December, and following the release of his new album Forest of Tranquility via Erased Tapes, Fujita brings a philosophy of deep listening that feels entirely radical in the confines of modern music. His journey, from years spent shaping sound in the concrete environment of Berlin to relocating to a former kindergarten surrounded by water and wildlife in rural Hyōgo, has given him a rare perspective on how acoustic spaces shape human emotion. For Fujita, music is not about filling every available second with sound, rather, it's about carving out an acoustic canvas where nature, memory, and the vastness of the universe can breathe.
That philosophy came to life vividly during his recent work for Expo 2025 in Osaka, where he was commissioned to create a soundtrack for a vast living nature installation featuring one thousand five hundred rescued trees. Rather than relying on simple, pleasant background textures, Fujita sought to introduce a subtle edge into the environment.
"The forest there was a man-made one, so my idea was to bring in the environment I live in, real nature, from where I am," Fujita explains. "I don't mean that literally, as in using field recordings. It was more about the feeling. My first aim was to bring depth to that forest through the music. As I worked on it, I also became conscious of the universe that lies beyond nature, and of a kind of spirituality within that. One more thing I had in mind was not to settle for easy, harmless music that just fills a space. Even for someone listening without paying much attention, I wanted there to be a moment where they think, 'wait, what was that?' Some friction in a good sense, an edge, something with artistry in it."
That commitment to artistic friction and negative space is deeply rooted in his relationship with his primary instruments, the vibraphone and the marimba. While many electronic and modern classical artists lean toward heavy compression and dense layering, Fujita finds his voice in the physical decay of a struck metal bar.
"For me silence in music often isn't complete silence, but the quieter moments between the notes," Fujita says. "Especially for the vibraphone, the tail of a note is so important and beautiful, and it makes up a huge part of the instrument's character. And in general, for any sound, if you have more empty space around it, you hear that sound more clearer. The emptiness makes it clearer and more vivid. It also creates an empty space on the canvas of the music, which leaves room for the listeners to evoke a story or a feeling. Maybe it's something like what you see in Japanese minimalist art."
That sense of visual and spatial pacing also informs his broader creative life, including his score for the acclaimed indie film Smoking Tigers. Having spent two years studying filmmaking at school, developing a deep admiration for poetic arthouse cinema and directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Tropical Malady), Fujita approaches sound with a cinematic eye. Writing music for film, he notes, is simply doing the work of his acoustic albums in reverse, treating the relationship between image and sound with rigorous care while actively avoiding easy emotional stereotypes.
When asked about the conceptual roots of his new album Forest of Tranquility, Fujita looks past the physical trees of the Osaka Expo site to something much larger. If the album were a physical place, he pictures a small island covered in trees, floating quietly in the night sky, surrounded by the infinite expanse of the universe with insect voices echoing across the cosmic waves. It is an image that feels strangely fitting for a festival like Wonderfruit, where thousands of people gather under the open night air of Thailand to lose themselves temporarily in art, community, and land.
Fujita’s connection to Southeast Asia runs deeper than a standard touring schedule. He has performed at Wonderfruit once before, and his parents previously lived next to the banks of the Mekong River in Nong Khai, Thailand, for fifteen years, a period that left him with lasting memories of profound human kindness and massive suns setting over open landscapes. Now, as he prepares to return to the kingdom, his hopes for his listeners are wonderfully simple yet immense.
"I hope it gives people a chance to slow down, and to remember the nature and the universe around them," Fujita reflects. "In modern society it's easy to forget that. Recently nature feels to me like a kind of device that makes us aware of the universe existing beyond it, a time and space far beyond what we can perceive. So if someone in a busy city hears the album and, even for a moment, senses that something vast is there behind the sounds, that would make me happy."
For urbanites navigating the dense traffic and flashing lights of Bangkok, or for festival-goers wandering the magical fields of Wonderfruit this December, Masayoshi Fujita offers a rare gift, a permission to stop, to embrace the quiet, and to listen to the vast universe waiting just behind the noise.
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