THE ART OFINSPIRATION

His approach can be heard across works including AZTEC, JOMON, YAYOI, MAYAN and smokey bonfire, as well as Amapiano collaborations with Mbali Baby.

Yet going into nature is not simply a search for new material. “I love spending time in the city, too. But when I go somewhere deep in the mountains, where I can no longer hear cars, my senses come back into focus. It resets my ears.”

He moves between the energy of the city and the stillness of the natural world, drawing something different from each.

The rawness of a sound may be accidental. What he ultimately creates with it is anything but. “My music can work anywhere,” he says. “Because I’ve created a complete world within it.”

For Mr. Adventure, creative freedom and perfectionism are not opposites. They are two essential parts of the same process.

Travel has also transformed the way he sees Japan. Temples, shrines, Japanese cuisine and familiar customs once seemed naturally exceptional to him. Encountering other cultures helped him recognize how deeply his own perspective had been shaped by the country in which he grew up.

“Now, even when I’m in Japan, I experience it like a traveler. The scenery, everyday life — it’s about how you look at the country where you were born.”

The familiar becomes unfamiliar again. And in that shift, new possibilities emerge. His musical curiosity moves just as freely across borders. Latin rhythms, African music, Middle Eastern sounds and influences from Central Asia have all found their way into his creative vocabulary.

But he has little interest in reproducing them exactly. “I learn through feeling, so I don’t really copy. I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my own music, but when I draw from something else, I follow my instincts. That’s probably why the result becomes something a little different.”

That balance extends beyond music. He is drawn to boldness, color and extravagance, but not to anything that feels cheap or careless.

The goal is creative freedom with refinement: work that can belong naturally in the worlds of fashion, luxury and international culture without sacrificing its individuality. For Mr. Adventure, sophistication is not the absence of excess. It is knowing how to give bold ideas a world of their own.

One particularly memorable place was a local hotel in Athens, a city he loves. On the top floor was a café terrace with a piano that was not quite in tune. He spent time there relaxing, playing and absorbing the atmosphere.

Sounds from that piano later found their way into With the Glow and other compositions. The instrument’s imperfections became part of the memory, and part of the music.

Yet travel is not always a solitary creative experience. Matsuda often approaches musicians himself, allowing a conversation or a chance encounter to turn spontaneously into making music together. Among those connections are Arashk, a pianist educated at Tehran University of Art whom he met in Estonia, and Ezi Q in Malaysia. Different backgrounds, different cultures, a shared desire to create.

After years of traveling, Matsuda has begun to feel that being in Japan and being abroad are no longer two separate states of mind. The distance between home and elsewhere has grown smaller.

And that realization has shaped what he wants to create next. “I want to make music that brings people together — beyond rules, cultures and religions. I want us to create something amazing together.”

There will always be another place to discover, another person to meet and another sound to explore. For Mr. Adventure, the studio has no walls. And the story is still being written.