Interview: Living.Canon w/ Cassie Kinoshi

Living.Canon is a show hosted by Cassie Kinoshi exploring heritage, memory, and self-discovery in contemporary classical, electronic, and improvised music. From 22 August 2026.

Excerpt

Cassie Kinoshi: Did you grow up playing classical piano or was it more improvising and playing jazz with other people?

Ben Nobuto: On the piano it was classical stuff like Debussy and Ravel, that was my gateway into classical music. But before that on drums I was playing more like funk, soul, jazz, groove-type music. So I had those two things growing up.

CK: That makes a lot of sense because a lot of your music is so rhythmic. If your formative years began as a drummer I wonder if that’s been retained in the way that you approach composition as well. Obviously there’s a pianist way of approaching rhythm but I’m always fascinating by how drummers approach and think about rhythm.

BN: Yeah, definitely. Actually it’s only recently where I’ve realised how those early years of playing drums has really influenced how I think about playing music, and the style of composition, how I’ll chop up cells of music.

. . .

CK: So you studied music at Cambridge. How did you find that?

BN: It was okay. At the time I was still figuring out my musical identity (well I still am), but definitely at the time I didn’t really know what I was doing. Also Cambridge is quite academic so you’re given a lot of essays and work, so I felt like I was so busy doing that a lot of the time that I didn’t have the time to think about my own music.

I think it was only after I left university where I wasn’t worried anymore about what teachers would think about my music, and I started to have all these realisations like, “oh, I can use these samples and take these jazz or electronic influences and combine them,” and I wasn’t as fearful of what people would think. So I remember that feeling really liberating, like “oh, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this . . .”