Q022:
On collaborations again, Haco has appeared on two AMT albums now, and the floating line up also has consisted of members of other Japanese bands, Tatsuya Yoshida was from Ruins. How do the collaborations come about?
A022:
AMT has never once had a fixed line-up. Everything can change according to the time, the place, the people, the sounds. And even then those are only factors of fate that the music itself puts in place for its summoning up. I cannot believe that having a fixed line-up would be good for the music. The music itself demands to reproduced in a form that is as close as possible to its original shape. That clearly entails that it be played by the most appropriate grouping of people. The music brings a certain group of people together, and they then recreate the music. In order to remove any possible obstructions to this process, we refuse to fix the group's line-up. (In the same way, the reason why we always improvise the songs is so that we do not try to straitjacket the music into pre-determined forms. Of course, when we play live there are certain semi-fixed thematic elements in the music, but we limit them to the absolute minimum.)
Also, in AMT there is no way that anyone can "leave" the group. When we played with Yoshida it was because fate linked him to us at that time. You could say that he was a fellow traveller for a while, called by the music. He may be called again to play with us. Only one thing is certain - no matter how convenient it may be to play with someone from the scene, if they have not been called to us by fate then we won't play with them. There is no need to.