Born in Osaka in 1960, Satoh's artistic career began at nine when he enrolled in a local music school to study the guitar. Unlike the music that was trickling into the youngster's ears via American radio stations, he found himself with a troupe of elderly people, learning the traditional art of Enga guitar.

'They just taught me this music, I didn't really have any choice in the matter. It was only when I was 13 that I discovered Simon and Garfunkel,' Satoh says. He studied Shakespeare at university and became an actor ('for about a year, then realised I had absolutely no talent') - then switched to movie-making. 'One day I screened a movie and had the idea that I could both play the film, and have dancers performing in front of it,' Satoh says. The fusion of these two mediums became Replicant's signature style. In 1997 the director formed desert MooN-13 with his muse, Tochimura. He had been reading Guy Foissy's La Dame Au Violoncelle and Patrick Suskind's Der Kotrabass. Then, one day,'while I was rehearsing with Yukiko, I saw something on her back', he says. 'It was a cello. Her body reminded me of the shape of that musical instrument.' In Strange Torso Tochimura plays the cello, dances and acts, and Satoh's music frames the piece. Despite the artistic advances he has made since he plucked strings with a group of wizened guitarists - music remains his driving inspiration. 'By the time I got to high school I listened to rock music from overseas, I didn't understand what they were singing about, but my body could feel what they meant,' Satoh says. 'I wanted to create on stage the feeling of rock music, to make the dancers carry this feeling. With Replicant there was a lot of rock, in Strange Torso it is more quiet and personal, but there is still that edgy feeling.'