Czech ethnomusicologist and composer Vlastislav Matoušek graduated in composition and completed a postgraduate course in music theory at the Faculty of Music of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
In 1996, as a Japan Foundation scholarship holder, he studied shakuhachi with Kifu Mitsuhashi in Tokyo and Japanese traditional music at the University of Letters in Osaka. He defended his dissertation Kinetics in Ethnic Music and received his doctorate in Music Theory - Theory of Composition from the Faculty of Music of the Academy of Performing Arts and was appointed Associate Professor in 2004. Since 1991 he has been teaching ethnomusicology at the Department of Theory and History of Music at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, since 1999 also at the Institute for Musicology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague and cooperates as a music journalist with Czech Radio.
In the 1980s he worked as a bass guitarist in the alternative rock band Máma Bubo. He also played this instrument in the 1990s in the ensemble Před vaším letopočtem and Yamabu, in which he applied the practices of ethnic music and modern classical music to rock aesthetics. Most often, however, he performs with the Japanese traditional shakuhachi flute, either as a soloist, a member of the Relaxace ensemble (with Jiří Mazánek and Karel Babuljak) focused on Asian classical music, or in occasional ensembles focused on the fusion of folk music and jazz.