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By Sasha Frere-Jones
At the end of March, Ryuichi Sakamoto, considered “arguably the most famous and successful Japanese musician in the world,” died at the age of seventy-one, from headaches due to a cancer he had been battling for two years. I met Sakamoto for the first time in 2018 and, since his diagnosis, I interviewed him. I’m not sure what form an article about Sakamoto would take, but I felt it was vital to capture as much as I could. Sakamoto moved from New York to Tokyo in 2022 to continue his treatment and our meetings have become less frequent. In the end, even Zoom got too tired and then left.
In July, still shaky, I went to the Shed at Manhattan’s Hudson Yards to see “Kagami,” a mixed-reality exhibit dedicated to his memory. For this piece, Sakamoto filmed for 3 days in December 2020 in a green screen studio in Tokyo. These photographs shape the foundations of a virtual Sakamoto with the same silver hair and circular tortoiseshell glasses as the living Sakamoto. There are moments in “Kagami” where the composer looks like a video game character who has unlocked the Piano Spirit level. But most of all, Sakamoto is the flame of his own virtual sanctuary, accompanied by the sound of his game and a circular background of rain, smoke, and stars. The paintings evoked do not distract from the impression that the screen – kagami means “mirror” in Japanese – seeks to be resurrected through reflection.
Some of the spectators at the Shed observed with the benevolent acceptance that they might bring to M.
His answer, as it should be, describes my own experience with Sakamoto. Their music balances two very distinct modes: slow, exact patterns and, indeed, experimental interpretation, especially when using completely new technologies. What brings me back to Sakamoto’s work, however, is the vulnerable nature of his research, the sense that savory delights and sweet melodies are equally valid answers to the questions each artist faces: What does consciousness look like?Why is delight so dry and mute, and then, on the other days, so utterly overwhelming?
“Kagami” is part of a wave of resurrections and reflections of Sakamoto. His second memoir, “How many more times will I see the full moon rise?” », has just been published in Asia, via Shinchosha. His first, “Musik Macht Frei,” was published in 2009, but neither has been translated into English. Earlier this year, Sakamoto released his previous album, titled “12. ” Although he described it more as a “diary” than a fully realized album, his ease with short tracks and sonic grain makes it a clever addition to his style of a bygone era. The last feature film he directed was “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus,” a film made in collaboration with his son, Neo Sora, who directed it. Working in a spacious concert hall at the NHK Broadcasting Center, Sakamoto strings together twenty songs in one hour and forty-three minutes, lovingly filmed in black and white. (“Opus” premiered in North America on October 11, at the sixty-first New York Film Festival). In the months after Sakamoto’s death, he reviewed the recordings of him. Prior knowledge is everything that, by its nature, only emerges in retrospect. Obviously, we don’t know who saw the future until it becomes our past. My feeling is that we are only beginning to perceive Sakamoto’s musical legacy.
As a child, Sakamoto became a composer when he began playing the piano – some say at the age of three – less than a year without work, at the age of thirteen, when he made the decision to briefly enroll in a basketball team. His father was an e-book publisher and curator. (In the ’90s, she walked out of a concert hall when she discovered her son had dyed his hair blonde. )Teenager Sakamoto attended Tokyo University of the Arts and graduated in 1976 with a master’s degree in music composition. By the mid-1970s, he was working as a keyboardist and arranger and was active in the Tokyo free-jazz scene. Later in his life, he disliked being known as a pianist because of what he perceived as his own technical limitations, but he still told Me that he was “in his prime” when he was eighteen.
Synthesizers, unknown to many in 1976, were how the public first got to know him. Bassist Haruomi Hosono and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi were friends of Sakamoto’s in the mid-’70s, appearing on each other’s records and reuniting at concerts. In 1978, Hosono invited them to his home and explained the concept of a new band over a rice ball dinner. “We’re going to organize Martin Denny’s ‘Firecracker’ as a big electric disco that will use synthesizers and sell 4 million copies of the single worldwide. “Explained. A few months later, his band’s debut album, Yellow Magic Orchestra, was released. Hosono’s note was more or less accurate. They were immediately huge.
The name Yellow Magic Orchestra was a planned game on the noxious concept of “exoticism” itself. Sakamoto called it “this false symbol of Asian culture, this stereotypical symbol of the exotic and the typical, that Americans have created in Hollywood!What propelled them all to stardom was, unsurprisingly, a cover of “Firecracker. “When Yellow Magic Orchestra appeared on “Soul Train,” the show’s host, Don Cornelius, described them as “the most popular new band in all of Japan. “”The musicians look dapper in matching white shirts. Between songs, Cornelius said, “In case other people on TV are wondering what’s going on, I have no idea. “Neither do Americans. Y. M. O. never took off on the U. S. charts. But Sakamoto has a bona fide Japanese pop star.
By 1980, Y. M. O. had released 3 albums, but Sakamoto knew that the band was “not doing anything new. “They were organized with Kraftwerk, the electronics organization that Sakamoto could say was innovating. Y. M. O. , on the other hand, was a silly jingle organization, whose early singles included 3 covers. (The Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” an unfortunate moment, was one of those singles. )To stand out, Sakamoto traveled to England to record a surreal electronic album, called “B-2 Unit”, under his own name. Sakamoto created a song called “Riot In Lagos” with sound engineer Dennis Bovell, a true architect of dub. XTC’s Andy Partridge, who was then topping the UK charts and at an artistic peak, also made the impression on ‘B-2 Unit’. The album sounds so existing and completely electronic that one can surprise other people who just don’t hear anything done forty-three years ago.
Consumer electronics brands such as Kyocera began featuring Sakamoto in television commercials. He is one of a celebrity couple with his wife, the virtuoso pianist and composer Akiko Yano, whom he married in 1982. In 1983, Sakamoto made a notable appearance, both as an actor and composer, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence “, a queer auteur film. Sakamoto plays Captain Yonoi, the Japanese commander overseeing a British prisoner of war, played by David Bowie. The film’s director, Array Nagisa Ōshima, cast Sakamoto alongside Bowie after noticing Sakamoto in a spread to a 1981 photography book containing portraits of men. Sakamoto, who was only twenty-nine years old at the time, looked like a gentle and intelligent dog, staring and simmering on the right page of the double, his eyes closed on a white blouse on the left. Not being a trained actor, Sakamoto took the name “Mr. Lawrence” because Ōshima agreed to let him write the film’s music. “Mr. Lawrence” revisits his most familiar piece, his “Hey Jude” or “Landslide. ” It is a glassy mechanism that runs through a pre-melody as noted as the main melody that Sakamoto would eventually record in many contexts and to many speeds – a basis for your experimental career.
Sakamoto will go on to collaborate with other people in Hollywood, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Charlie Brooker and Alejandro González Iñárritu. While this work helped pay the bills, Sakamoto never fully surrendered to the world of storytelling. In 1984, Sakamoto appeared with Korean-American videographer Nam June Paik for an evening of impromptu music in honor of Paik’s new book, “Time Collage. “On stage, Sakamoto freestyled with a toy trumpet, while Paik spoke, accomplishing anything between comedy and functional art. . When I was with him, Sakamoto seemed more excited to talk about John Cage or the sound of trees than anything else.
In May 1984, photographer Elizabeth Lennard made a one-hour documentary about Sakamoto called “Tokyo Melody”, for the experimental branch of French national television. Although Tokyo had public video billboards at the time and Sakamoto appeared in many advertisements, the team couldn’t be sure if they would find one of them spontaneously gambling in the wild. To solve this problem, Lennard rented a screen in a Tokyo square and went there early one morning to film Sakamoto’s state in front of the screen while his advertisements showed him. “We went very early in the morning because Ryuichi was worried that there would be too many fans,” Lennard told me. “After about a quarter of an hour, some young women were sitting on the sidewalk, crying, and they moved to see him. Think of the Beatles in Japan.
In “Tokyo Melody”, Sakamoto appears several times in all-metallic eyeshadow and a suit, talking about the fact that “time is no longer linear” for songwriters and about Japan’s primacy among capitalist countries at a time when “the political season is over”. While playing with a toy ray gun, he says he is “absorbed” in the “mistakes or noises” of the generation and wonders if “new cultural currents could emerge from this deficiency. “-Hop, noise music, glitch and all genres based on generating machines designed to do anything different than what they ended up doing.
As soon as Sakamoto delved into the depths of the avant-garde, he was invited back into the enlightened world of celebrity. Sakamoto appeared as director in Madonna’s 1993 music video for “Rain,” not because he had anything to do with the song yet because, as director Mark Romanek put it, he was “the most iconic, famous, horny Japanese icon. “
Despite being an iconic icon, Sakamoto spent the last twenty-five years of his life as an ambitious and generous musical collaborator. In my conversations with him, we never seemed to communicate in particular about music or non-music, but rather about a continuum of occasions with musical implications. The global and the musical in the global seemed to be a proposition for Sakamoto. “I enjoyed his love of ambient sound and the fact that he didn’t distinguish between the noise of civilization and nature and music and silence and all the things that are elementary,” Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, told me. “He was a postmodern impressionist or whatever you want to call him. “
One of my favorite examples of Sakamoto’s mechanical humanity is “Esperanto”, an album he made for a dance piece by Molissa Fenley in 1985. He made it with the Fairlight CMI, the pinnacle of sample generation, used in majors hits by Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel and the art of noise. What stands out about this music is that the production facets that are popular now were anything but back then, and yet Sakamoto may already have heard what sampling generation can do. He has realized that he can locate a small burst of sound (anything he pleases, regardless of its tone or classical musicality) and use it as a blood spurt in movies. It’s what musicians call a “stab,” at the heart of the work of brands like DJ Premier. Or you can repeat a word indefinitely, a resolution that permanently replaced the way he painted popular music. Or a sound wave can be distorted and mutilated, something unusual in the paintings of Arca and Vegyn and other manufacturers of the time. All of those methods are provided in this brilliant and quirky album.
My affection for Sakamoto didn’t stop me from seeing the paintings themselves. I’d be lying if I said I discovered all of their equally gratifying reports. “Sakamoto, the mad genius with extinct technology” is infinitely preferable to “Sakamoto, the creator. “A pin-up song”, this last technique was seriously tried in the 90s with several pop albums that failed to the maximum in each and every way. However, the scale of their task is significant. There was very little condescension in Sakamoto’s paintings, toward other music, or even toward his own past careers. It didn’t seem like the mainstream had angered him, yet he struggled to be himself in the available contexts, which he tried for the first time. “I don’t like acting,” Sakamoto told Elle in 1988. Maybe it’s because I have to play fanatical Japanese villains. I’d like to play someone who is fashionable and sensitive. “
“He’s very smart, but very cute,” musician Laurie Anderson told me a few months after Sakamoto’s death. “I found him incredibly endearing and beautiful. ” The way Sakamoto is as tender in his art as he is in his life is reflected in the music itself. In the late ’90s, Sakamoto scaled back his compositions to concentrate on the melodic core while opening up his recording process to the highest level. to film sound design. One of the most memorable occasions was the meeting with the German artist and musician Carsten Nicolai. Sakamoto attended Nicolai’s first concert in Japan and asked him to remix “Insensatez”, a song by Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos Jobim that Sakamoto The two men then began a long process of file sharing, culminating in twenty years of collaborative albums, adding the soundtrack to “The Revenant”.
The two recorded an album titled “Glass” at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. Microphones were placed in windows around the building, just before a typhoon hit the start of the concert. “The beginning of the album is essentially ‘The rain plays in the house,'” Nicolai told me. To perceive Sakamoto’s last few decades of work, one can think of this rain as a nature that gives back, provides its music in the form of recording boxes, and the piano itself has literally exploded into a series of tones and opportunities to make noise. Sometimes the piano is just a piano in itself, betting on a Sakamoto motif. Other times, it’s the concept of the piano, the summari, relaxed tonalities.
My favorite Sakamoto album is “async,” released in 2017, in part because it combines almost everything there was about Sakamoto. It was recorded while he was recovering from an illness and was not created for any label, client or filmmaker. for himself. The melodies and textures of “async” feel like a photo album, a prismatic review of your interests. This creation is one of the subjects of Stephen Nomura Schible’s 2018 documentary, “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda,” which is as quiet and unneurotic as Sakamoto’s. music. You see Sakamoto consciously deciding to use an excerpt from writer Paul Bowles that reads “The Sheltering Sky”. He ventures out to record the sound of leaves in an unidentified forest and selects the sound of a cube he carries above his head.
“Coda” begins with his pilgrimage to Miyagi Prefecture. “I heard about a piano that survived the tsunami,” he says at the opening. (He ended up recording the piano for “asynchronous” parts. ) In “Coda,” the Geiger counter appears to measure Fukushima and Sakamoto, who was diagnosed with level III throat cancer in June 2014. “I couldn’t settle for that,” he said, seeming to really settle for it. At the beginning of the film, he plays “Mr. Lawrence” for a family audience at one of the best schools that was used as an evacuation site during the initial crisis. You see him running to the music of “The Revenant” and running in “async. “It was his edition of relaxing while he was sick.
After we met, in 2018, Sakamoto and I had coffee and he invited me to see a young Japanese band called Kukangendai. More than a little intimidated by the concept of status next to the maestro at a raucous rock concert, I pleaded with him with a ridiculous excuse, a choice I regret. In the years that followed, COVID and cancer made it highly unlikely to meet in person, Zoom closed that hole several times. The last photographs I saw of Sakamoto were recently shown to me through a member of the circle of relatives. : An iPhone video of his final moments taken on March 28. Slim, with longer hair and breathing through an oxygen mask, Sakamoto is animated, directing with his right hand, and then using the same hand to play a figure on an invisible piano. A not unusual time for musicians, where we play and pay attention at the same time. You may have simply heard the song on your mask, the piano in your head, or something else. ♦
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