Interview: Nobonoko, Master of the Minimal Sequencer

Interview: nobonoko,

Master of the Minimal Sequencer

27th of March, 2026

Music is art, makes political statements, signifies membership to social groups, sells products, is supposedly being automated, and overall has a lot going on at once. What gets increasingly ignored by this tempest is the craft involved in making great music. To take an example from the current cultural imagination, the musician Bad Bunny releases great songs, but he isn't successful because he is great at rapping (though no doubt he is). He is successful because the songs address topical politics. An integral part of his coolness appeal is not trying too hard when performing, whereas the other, less important people working on his music are responsible for making everything sound good. This phenomenon is not exclusive to him; almost all popular musical artists work this way.

My favorite contemporary artist, nobonoko, represents an opposite. His music is best summarized as a journey to master a family of sequencing software called BeepBox-likes. BeepBox is a minimal music-making tool that runs in the browser, originally released in 2012 by software engineer and game developer John Nesky, later inspiring forks with extended functionality like JummBox and UltraBox. Even the extended versions, however, are simple TypeScript programs, under 2MB in total download size. The entire user interface fits on one screen — default BeepBox even hides most notes. The major scale is called the "normal" scale in BeepBox's settings.

Using these extremely simple tools, nobonoko makes incredible pieces. For newcomers, I'd recommend the albums Strawberry+ (eight variations on a single Aspartame-sweet theme), Gato (rainy 70s synth jazz), Swamp (ambient with some hip-hop elements), and of course Music for Animal Cafés (very unique, could be described as Shibuya-kei with Latin jazz elements). Songs often re-arrange and refine previous compositions, so that an album's creation can be traced over multiple years via single releases of rawer versions.

The entire BeepBox user interface.

Whether it's a short track or a whole album, visual artwork by nobonoko himself accompanies each release. Once you're familiar with the intimacy and cohesiveness that this gives rise to it's hard not to miss it in all other music. The cover art is one of the few context clues available to make sense of the music, which otherwise has to stand by its own, as text descriptions of releases are usually short, and little information nobonoko himself is known. Within those short descriptinos however, nobonoko gets a lot of worldbuilding done. In particular, some albums are set in an alternative history, authored by fictional musicians whose careers span the 70s and 80s.

One notable difference between the real world and the nobonoko musical universe is that the characters are anthropomorphic animals. I find the furry influence in nobonoko's work very interesting, since despite an astounding volume of furry drawing and painting, along with a flourishing market for commissions giving rise to transactions of up to $20,000 in single cases, I had never before come across a piece that truly stands on its own. The accompanying pieces for nobonoko's music on the other hand show common themes from the community in a different light; somehow furry-ness is an integral part of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The nobo-verse is populated by mostly men (with only one female-coded character appearing unnamed on the cover of the bright-pink electronica single Tokyo Fashion District), which is explained by subtle (and not-so-subtle) gay themes throughout the lore. The ribbon on all of it is a thoroughly disarming sense of humor. For instance, though YouTube is the primary platform of distribution, nobonoko blends releases of hour-long albums with nonsensical joke videos, in full disregard for recommender algorithm optimization or any other kind of business practice.

The cover for the 2023 EP What Time is it?

When a nobonoko song is finished, the result is a program with respect to the BeepBox-like program as the compiler, making it extremely succinct of a description of the sound. To see a finished song from the composer's perspective, see Tokyo Fashion District in Ultrabox here. The format is so compact (23KB) that the song is completely specified in the URL on this HTML page! The compositions recall Piet Mondrian's paintings, which can be specified very succinctly in the language of mathematics, but are still more dynamic and evocative than other paintings made of organic brushstrokes.

To find out how so much can be done with so little, nobonoko and I sat down for an interview.

• • •

• What advantages does Jummbox/BeepBox have over other ways of making music? nobonoko: It's really accessible and anyone with a browser connection can access BeepBox and start making music. If they keep going, they're likely to move to a real DAW, but I ended up staying on BeepBox instead, since I found that it already has most of what I need. Subtractive and FM synthesis, sampling features, modulators, LFOs and pitch bending as intuitive as physically bending the note itself. It may not be as technically capable as something like Ableton, but that makes it fun to always push the limits of the program.
• Your playlist "nobo-like sound" is the best source of interesting music on the internet, in my opinion. How do you find music? nobonoko: I find music through YouTube, because it's the most accessible and comprehensive archive of music on the internet that I know of. My advice is to always check the musician's other works or associated artists and to avoid running the risk of only knowing the 2 or 3 most popular songs from an artist. Check music archive sources such as reupload channels. You may find something that will change your music taste for life. Overall, there is no best way to find music as long as you're discovering something new. Sometimes I've found music by googling random words.
• What do you think is special about DS-era music? nobonoko: I like background and MIDI music from the 2000s because I've always had a fascination with virtual instruments, and music from the 3DS combines that with great composition and arrangement. Many of the instrument samples used on the Wii and 3DS are also often very high quality. Whether it's latin jazz, disco, house or orchestral music, there is always something charming about it being arranged with virtual instruments, regardless of it sounding realistic or not. It's the same thing that draws me to cartoon soundtracks for example.
• Is there anything about your music that is uniquely Brazilian? There are some obvious Bossa elements like Wolkatzen 2/3 or Waterfront Booossa, but beyond that your music seems to be borrowing in a very cosmopolitan way, like the, for lack of a better word, 3DS Frutiger Aero style. nobonoko: My friend said that my bossa nova arrangements sound very Japanese compared to other western musicians. Most of my influences are Japanese so my attempts at latin music are also very Japanese in flavour.
• You blend many styles, to the point that I have trouble labeling your music as a specific genre. Who would you point to as a particularly formative influence? nobonoko: Definitely CAPSULE and the works by Yasutaka Nakata, mostly from before 2006, but also stuff from his post-Fruits-Clipper era. His style was sugary, cute and overproduced Shibuya-kei-esque pop with lush virtual instrument arrangements on top of jazz and 60s-style easy listening songs. It was the main inspiration behind my most popular projects such as Strawberry Cake and Music for Animal Cafés. A lot of young people seem to crave that sound today, which is a happy coincidence to me. Yellow Magic Orchestra is also a notable influence, a trio of musicians at the forefront of musical technology credits across several great albums and a wide variety in style and tone from song-to-song and album-to-album. I don't think there has ever been any band quite like them. Other misc artists that deeply influenced me include Plus-tech Squeeze Box, Hiroshi Sato, Windows96 and SOPHIE.

I'll leave it up to a critic to label me with a genre. I am ready to hate it. Just don't be Picopop.

• How did Blockyeen Records originally sign David Wojciechowski? nobonoko: He moved to London after graduating to study music and found a passion for synthesisers and song arranging. He got signed to BLOCKYEEN Entertainment as a stock music producer for a couple of years.

Cover of the 2023 album How Many Cats Are in This Picture?

• Why do your albums take place in the past, not in the present or future? nobonoko: My only works that explicitly take place in the past are the alt-history albums. Music for Animal Cafés is proudly an album from the 2020s!
• When you write songs, are you strictly analytical about it or is there emotion guiding you? nobonoko: I'm never analytical because I never know what I'm doing. I don't even have a feeling ready, I just do it and the emotion comes after.
• Are there any pieces you connect to specific emotions? nobonoko: I associate most of my songs with the experience of listening to a very nice song.
• Your music is mostly played by a computer, not by musicians. What does that allow you to do that other music can't do? nobonoko: It can do too much to compare the two with each other. They're very different approaches to creating music that are equally valid, but do completely different things. Computers are cool because you can theoretically make any sound, and that includes any song. The computer allows me to carefully place down as many notes in as many channels as I want to and play them all at once while having two extra arms to add more notes. You can synthesise and manipulate any sound to any shape. My love for music is love for producing and arranging.
• Unlike many musicians, you also create the visual art accompanying your music. This allows you to world-build. One comparison I can think of is Louie Zong, but is there anyone else who influenced you here, or does it all come from inside? nobonoko: I have a very do-it-yourself approach to making art. I like creating as many of the assets as I can. I like most aspects of music and its packaging and I like having control over the entire narrative. If there is an aspect that I can't pull off but believe that I could in theory be capable of doing, I work towards improving it. I never thought I'd really be a graphic designer when I started taking art seriously. I never thought I'd write the lyrics and sing on a song. I never thought I'd ever even make an album! I originally was going to use AI to stand in for the imagery of David Wojciechowski because I didn't think I could be at the level to fully render a vintage photograph-style painting of an anthro wolf next to analog synth equipment to my liking. But it turned out to be a lot more fun and freeing to just try to paint it all myself.
• Bach or Mozart? nobonoko: Hmm…
• Is there some influence that furry-ness has had on your music, or is it disconnected? nobonoko: I've never thought much about it. It's probably connected in some abstract sense, in the way queerness and neurodivergence are also present in so many aspects of the things I do. My alt-history stuff is probably the best example since it combines all of those things at once — the sexual, the neurodivergent, the furry and the love for a specific era of music — in a way that is miraculously accessible to many people.

I'm sometimes afraid that some people might end up viewing me as a "safe" alternative to furry music since I'm not making explicit "hyperpop" like other furries. I think that's a shame because that kind of music is really cool and is also an important cultural aspect of the community. But I'm happy to think my music can still depict the experience of being a furry beyond the most superficial level.

• From your upload history, it seems like you first put out singles, then decide which to develop into albums. Is that because you want to find out which your audience likes better, or is there something else that makes you come back and develop a whole album? nobonoko: Hahaha I do that sometimes! This used to be my main model especially before one of my albums blew up. Personally I don't really take the audience's response to a song too much into account. I just turn a song into an album if I feel like it should have one. An album often just appears out of one song unexpectedly. Gato was originally a cover I made of a song from Electric Jungle Critters out of boredom. The storyline that it was made in 1978 came right after. Besides, people have been receptive to even some of my stranger albums so far, which I'm really grateful for.

• • •

Listen to nobonoko's music here and buy it here.