GoKawiilInterview: 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?
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