Ryuichi Sakamoto - The Last Emperor

Ryuichi Sakamoto was one of the great pioneers of cross-pollination between traditional Eastern music and Western electronic avant-garde. Few artists managed to range across such different genres without losing their artistic compass: from pop to dance, from ambient to bossa nova, from ethnic music to classical.

His creative force, free of compromise, never rode the intellectual impulses of his contemporaries either, preserving originality and coherence without ever curdling into cliché. All of this is distilled in a long series of remarkable melodies that became familiar because they already belonged to our collective imagination, lying in wait for someone to play them; his music, at times, even brushed up against superficiality and inconsistency, but only because that was part of the project itself. At the core of his work remains the concept (absorbed from Wayne Shorter) of making Duty Free Music - in other words, music free of obligations.

Ryuichi Sakamoto was born in Nakano (Tokyo), in a Japan still deeply bound to tradition and reluctant to open up, even in music, to Western trends.

At the age of three, he learned to play piano, and by high school he was already in a band. It was during this period that his main musical interests turned toward the Beatles, Beethoven and John Cage, as well as the more heterodox avant-garde, thanks also to his studies at the Tokyo University of the Arts. After graduating, the Tokyo-born musician founded Yellow Magic Orchestra, a group devoted to electro-pop experiments in the futurist vein of Kraftwerk's iconography. Alongside Sakamoto (keyboards), the group featured Haruomi Hosono (formerly bassist of Happy End) and Yukihiro Takahashi (formerly drummer of Sadistic Mika Band).

After their self-titled debut album, the band achieved considerable success abroad too with Solid State Survivor, a record poised between synth-pop and techno-rock. But subsequent albums failed to live up to that promise, veering toward a blatantly commercial brand of electronic pop.

Meanwhile, in '78 the Japanese musician released his first solo album, Thousand Knives Of Asia, followed two years later by B2 Unit (which also featured a contribution from Andy Partridge of XTC) - two completely different works that immediately showcased Sakamoto's great eclecticism. When YMO disbanded in 1983, their leader went on to a brilliant solo career, starting with the score for Nagisa Oshima's film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, in which Sakamoto also starred alongside David Bowie. The soundtrack was made in collaboration with David Sylvian of Japan, and was crowned by the splendid single "Forbidden Colours".

In 1984 came Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, in which the Tokyo composer clearly laid out the underlying aim of his work: the fusion of Western music and Eastern sensibility, achieved through refined pieces like "Etude" and "Tibetan Dance", in the spirit of orchestral jazz, or through minimalist suites like "Paradise Lost".

The following album, Neo Geo, is one of his most accomplished works, thanks in part to contributions from Bill Laswell and a host of collaborators. His ethnic roots blend seamlessly with Western pop music and funky rhythms, even brushing up against the electronic world-music of Holger Czukay and Peter Gabriel. The title track mixes funky beats with searing female vocalizations in Japanese, while "Shogunade" combines tribal rhythms with electronic effects. The instrumental tracks are excellent too, from "Before Long" to "After All", which brush against new age, while the poignant melody of "Free Trading" and the playful symphony of "Parata" are further (masterful) demonstrations of how avant-garde ethnic music and electronic pop can be fused together.

Sakamoto travels through rhythms and melodies without ever giving up his refined piano playing or his ecstatic, Orient-scented atmospheres. Over the years, he has emerged as a modern composer, adept at exploiting electronic studio equipment to the fullest and at designing multimedia scenarios. His vast discography ranges freely between forays into sophisticated electronic pop, classically-styled film scores, and solo piano records. His albums boast a string of prestigious collaborations with artists of the caliber of David Sylvian, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Youssou N’Dour, Thomas Dolby, David Byrne, and Hector Zazou.

Ambition and versatility show up on every front. Beauty (1990), for instance, is another wide-ranging compendium of assorted refinements; Heartbeat even brushes up against the most sophisticated house and downtempo trends of the period; while Sweet Revenge attempts, in 1994, a foray into the minefield of hip-hop. Sakamoto explained the project like this: "It has a sentimental, melancholy atmosphere. I wanted to bring back into pop music the song form, which had been forgotten for too long. This is my sweet revenge." And he added: "Hip-hop uses samples taken from tracks of the '60s and '70s that weren't recorded as well as today's records. Old French film soundtracks have that same timbre. I call it low-fi, low fidelity. Nowadays everyone's chasing hi-fi. But me and the hip-hop kids prefer low-fi." In doing so, he was anticipating a retro attitude that's quite fashionable today, like reproducing the typical crackle of old vinyl on CD.

Over the years, Sakamoto also specialized in film scores. The one for Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor earned him an Oscar, but also worth remembering are The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha (again for Bertolucci), as well as the music for the ballet Esperanto (School). "Writing music for film, on commission, is a different thing," he explains, "but in reality, once you're inside the compositional process, you're no longer able to tell what the underlying reason was. You just have to pull it off, and that's what matters. I love writing, and that's maybe why I write so much. It's a challenge, but a pleasant one, because it also carries within it the chance to keep studying. And fortunately I write very different kinds of music, which helps me keep progressing." It's work that Sakamoto carries out with painstaking meticulousness, drawing inspiration from his favorite film composers: Ennio Morricone, Bernard Herrmann, and Antoine Duhamel, who wrote several soundtracks for the films of Jean-Luc Godard.

After the lighter detour of Smoochy, Sakamoto revisits all his ambitions as a composer poised between classical and pop on Discord (1998), a multimedia work that also includes a video and an internet connection. The overture of "Grief" blends Japanese tradition with Western symphonic music, unfolding in a dramatic crescendo amid bell tolls, dissonances, and electronic breezes. "Prayer" is a soft melody for clarinet, violins, and piano. "Salvation" is an orchestral suite built on strings over a backdrop of Japanese melodies. Once again Sakamoto manages to weave a web of delicate sonic cartilage linking ancient Japan to the modern Western avant-garde.

A line of thinking carried forward in 2000 with Intimate. The same year also saw the release of Cinemage (a collection of soundtrack themes) and Back To The Basics, which contains a series of solo piano compositions. The single "Energy Flow", taken from the album, sold over a million and a half copies at home, staying at number one on the charts for several weeks and setting a record for a solo piano track. At this stage, the Japanese composer was fascinated by acoustic sounds, but new releases of music software were already tempting him back towards electronics. His pipe dream, however, led even further afield: "I'm going to make my first opera," he announced. "It'll be very unconventional, multimedia, with singers and dancers from different schools."

In 2002 Sakamoto divorced his wife Akiko Yano, a Japanese pianist and singer with whom he also had a long artistic partnership.

These were years of nonstop releases, mostly anthologies, live albums and soundtracks for film and TV. Worth noting is the collection Moto.Tronic (2003), which tries to sum up the best of his long career, as does Piano Pieces (2004), which gathers his finest piano scores.

The collaboration with Alva Noto's electronics yields two fine records, Vrioon (2003) and Insen (2005).

With the following Chasm, Sakamoto allows himself his first pop-leaning solo release in seven years, returning to original compositions after the two tribute albums to bossa nova master Antonio Carlos Jobim, released with Jaques and Paula Morelenbaum under the name Morelenbaum2/Sakamoto.

For the occasion, a star-studded cast of guests gathered around Tokyo's "Emperor": David Sylvian, MC Sniper, Sketch Show (featuring a member of YMO), Keigo Oyamada (aka Cornelius), Arto Lindsay, Carsten Nicolai (Noto), Amedeo Pace (Blonde Redhead), to name but a few. What's missing, though, is a unifying vision capable of effectively tying together the countless musical ideas sketched out here. The musical spectrum is indeed vast. And the much-touted "pop" turn is in reality rather virtual. Its fruits can mainly be tasted in the opening melody of "Undercooled" (also the only truly effective track on the record), a hip-hop cut steeped in Eastern flavors entrusted to Korean rapper MC Sniper, and in "World Citizen", which renews his historic partnership with David Sylvian in a faint, digitally manipulated piano/voice ballad (lovely, but light years from the celestial heights of "Forbidden Colours"). The ethnic strand grows more abstract, almost stylized, surfacing in the dozens of voices with different accents reciting lines like ⟦Q1⟧ on "War & Peace" (with lyrics by Lindsay), or in the synthetic bossa nova of "Ngo/Bitmix", sung in Brazilian Portuguese by Maucha Adnet.

The rest is above all an exploration of the outposts of contemporary electronics, from glitch to ambient music, filtered through the Japanese composer's "traditionalist" and almost mystical sensibility. Sakamoto takes on the noisiest Autechre in the four white-hot minutes of electrical distortion that make up "Coro", plays with loops and glitches on "20 msec", and samples birdsong recorded live at Lake Turkana on "Only Love Can Conquer Hate". These are exercises in minimalist experimentation that nonetheless tip over into self-indulgence. All the more liberating, then, are those "classic" instrumentals that briefly bring us back to the purest heart of Sakamoto-music, whether it's the piano sonata of the title track or the poignant theme for the "Seven Samurai" video game, almost like a Satie piece transfigured into gagaku.

The Emperor's new clothes are, as usual, dazzling, but this time they don't quite match up. Chasing sounds and timbres in a schizophrenic fashion, Sakamoto risks losing the key to that musical syncretism which had always made his works so special.

The partnership with another guru of international electronics, Christian Fennesz, born after the two performed together in Rome at the Sala Santa Cecilia of the Auditorium Parco della Musica, gave rise to an interesting record, Cendre (2007). The Viennese composer's music, emotional yet hidden, provides a backdrop scenery for the whole duration, never giving in to the temptation to take center stage. And so it's Sakamoto's almost invasive touch that catches the ear, skilled as he is at inserting himself into the landscape with icy melodic lines, or with brief but repeated haikus of intensely visionary, Satie-like quality.

A contrast that naturally finds mediation, even though the compositional process took shape at a distance. It seems, in fact, to have been based on a mutual exchange of ideas, sketches and cues, later developed and polished by one or the other, depending on the case.

The album suffers from a certain underlying one-dimensionality, but what still deserves appreciation is the project's far-reaching syncretism, which finds its most complete expression precisely in the details, in moments frozen like freeze-frames, stolen from the flow of space and time. It's the aesthetic of the digital that triumphs in the urban blue neon, in the solitude of the soul, in the search for some undefined something. Once again, a record to daydream to.

Designed to later become the subject of a series of live performances available for purchase only through iTunes, Out Of Noise (2009) offers twelve instrumental pieces that alternate minimalism ("Hibari"), experimental fragments ("Tama") and cinematic music ("Disko"), building a sonic whole of spectral allure. The concept of beauty has always permeated Sakamoto's music, and after extolling its more vigorous side on Beauty, he now seems to be celebrating its starkest, most poetic face.

"Hibari" opens the sequence with a minimal structure that offers no respite; that same rigidity only returns at the end, on closer "Composition 0919", which revives the pianistic atonality that marked the more abrasive pages of Dischord.

Enchanting is "In The Red", a dreamy, fluid build-up of electronic atmospheres, with voices and repetitive sounds enveloping the minimal piano structure. Sakamoto crafts a series of imaginative sonic landscapes somewhere between Budd and Bryars, with notable results on "Disko" and "Ice", but "Firewater" is the real gem of the album: electronic sounds that dissolve into the anguish of infinity.

"Hwit" and "Still Life" hint at the melancholy writing of his finest soundtracks, but do so with acrid electronic sounds that give them an unprecedented shape; "Tama" tastefully crosses into more experimental territory, and "Nostalgia" touches on romantic fragments that are sublimated on the delightful "To Stanford", where the piano pulls the composition toward a classicism that never grows cloying.

Playing The Piano (2009) reconciles audiences with the more classical image of Sakamoto: the skilled, intense pianist in love with Debussy, as well as the creator of some of the most evocative and suggestive themes in film music. The Japanese composer revisits some of the best-known pages of his repertoire without resorting to mere calligraphy; the notes are drained of excess lyricism to reveal a structural energy that withstands reinterpretation.

"Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence", "The Last Emperor" and "The Sheltering Sky" flirt with the listener's own spaces of memory, but without overplaying the emotional tone: romanticism turns into carnality and contemplation, and every small note seems to underline a torment that wasn't perceptible in the original versions. Sakamoto tears the harmonies apart only to stitch them back together, shedding new light on old, yellowed pages like "Tibetan Dance" and "Thousand Knives". Elsewhere, colour gives way to a black-and-white rich in nuance, with delightful results on "Amore" and "Riot In Lagos".

There is no uncertainty within the sonic weave of Playing The Piano, but it's a perfection full of flair and surprises.

At the peak of his extraordinary career, Ryuichi Sakamoto still has the taste and curiosity to keep seeking out new collaborators, especially among musicians one or two generations younger than himself. After his successes with Alva Noto and the less thrilling work with Christopher Willits, the Japanese musician embarked on a new collaboration with 12k label owner Taylor Deupree.

The two musicians first made contact a few years earlier, but it was a concert organised by John Zorn at his New York club The Stone that brought them together in person. On the evening of 27 April 2012, the seeds of their future collaboration were sown. One of the five tracks on Disappearance (2013), "This Window", comes directly from that concert. The other four tracks were recorded at Sakamoto's studio in New York, where both musicians live. The host played piano and also handled some electronic instruments, while Deupree brought along some synthesizers, an acoustic guitar and a few old magnetic tapes.

"Jyaku", the opening track, immediately reveals the project's strengths and weaknesses: Deupree assembles his characteristic small acoustic orchestra, scraping percussion and guitar strings as he tries to lay the groundwork for a story to tell; Sakamoto, at first, simply lays down a dark drone, then begins distilling clusters of notes like morning dew drops. A melancholy, intimate atmosphere quickly takes hold, forming a kind of connective thread running through the whole album — so much so that we find ourselves with only minimal variation on the second track, "Frozen Fountain", where the atmosphere becomes even more rarefied.

The recording from The Stone is telling: Sakamoto improvises, playing a handful of notes that seem to come straight out of one of his film scores, while Deupree tries to pave, with noise and scraps of drone, a path for the Japanese musician's improvisation. But the two only really seem to meet well past the track's midpoint, after treading carefully, each in his own world, showing great respect for one another but also an inability to find a shared language. The evocative closing track, "Curl To Me", is enriched by the ultra-vivid vocals of Ichiko Aoba, who had already collaborated with both Sakamoto and Deupree.

Two years later came Perpetual, a masterful essay in ambient sound art, again co-signed with Deupree and the talented "students" Illuha. Three suites of just under twenty minutes each make up a work genuinely devoted to self-contemplation. With any subject lost from sight starting with the title itself, the four musicians weave together abstracted sensations and personal perceptions, translating process-generation into a thoroughly human phenomenon. This shift becomes clear in the third movement, where Sakamoto's delicate, limpid piano acts as a brush over the mottled backdrop built by Illuha and the golden streams signed by the "Faint"-era Deupree, preserving the watercolour quality while chasing after impression. All this without giving up an earthly component, in the form of natural field recordings, which abandon any landscape-painting purpose to become pure sonic material. Welcoming us into this parallel universe, where form perhaps matters more than substance (and for once that's no bad thing), is a solitary, timeless drone, a vital breath that slowly generates a range of primary colours in the form of single harmonies. These then blend together until they merge into a myriad of shades, to which Corey Fuller's guitar arpeggios cyclically add a further accent. The first movement loops back into the second, overall the least successful of the three, where the protagonist is the rarefaction of Deupree's microsound, in what nonetheless turns out to be a fascinating return to the past.

Nothing revolutionary, shocking or historic here. "Just" two masters conversing with their most talented students, drawing a line that embraces ambient sound art in all its perpetual shades.

In 2017, four years after being diagnosed with throat cancer and eight years after his last studio effort, the Japanese maestro gives himself over to a kind of writing that, starting from chaos, proceeds to impose a rigorous order, in an attempt to catalogue a variety of feelings and perceptions whose juxtaposition generates stark contrasts.

async is the product of a direct need: to listen to and capture a certain kind of sound, inspired by the modest beauty of everyday objects and of nature in its most essential forms, giving them a fully realised meaning that plays out within just a few minutes.

Captured outdoors or within the rooms of a museum, the field recordings scattered across the fourteen sequences reflect a desire to place each moment within a specific location, real or imagined, in which the various keyboards and acoustic and electronic entities move undisturbed, like the shadows of supporting characters.

More than places, then, what emerge are spaces for reflection that, like litmus tests, reveal the shifting tones of a solitude sought out and jealously guarded. For Sakamoto, composing through progressive subtraction is hardly new territory — weighing every element with care while never abandoning his taste for experimenting with unheard-of combinations. And yet, taken as a whole, “async” is willing to stumble into imperfection and the provisional, embracing a low-key approach with generosity and arriving, by roundabout and unexpected paths, at the sublime.

The Japanese maestro's suffering knew no respite. After a long series of treatments and surgeries, news of the cancer's return once again left an indelible mark on Sakamoto's life.

As always, great artists, in their moments of greatest personal hardship, find a measure of solace in documenting that difficult time through the channels most natural to them.

12 (2023) is the project that, six years on from async, perfectly captures the state of the Japanese composer.

These events led Sakamoto to pick up again with synthesizers, long since set aside, now used to compile an audio diary that could faithfully document the restless spirit of this harsh personal journey.

The collection is also made up of twelve tracks, surely among the most intense and evocative the Japanese artist ever produced, each identified only by its bare recording date.

The synthesizers take hold of the scene right from the opening track, “20210310”: desolate, mournful echoes, a kind of synthetic, celestial envelope that settles along the path toward brighter, more serene flashes, moments where the artist's unmistakable touch emerges. This takes shape in “20211130”, where the piano makes its entrance, with the typical minimal vibrations Sakamoto uses to let the silences between notes expand, here accompanied by faint electronic backgrounds.

Another constant throughout this intense work is the tangible presence of human breath — in all likelihood his own — an effect that first appears in “20211201”, a rhythmic movement that acts as a conductor, yet conceals within it feelings of both suffering and comfort.

Darkness reveals itself in its most absolute form in “20220202”, where the synths accompany us into a buzzing, turbulent, sinister sea, a setting that depicts the place where life and death fight to the bitter end. A stark contrast with the hazy sweetness radiating from “20220207”, in which the steady piano notes are adorned with hushed synthetic sounds and noises that seem to come from medical equipment. With “20220214” the sonic shadow reaches its peak, an episode in which drawn-out, almost drone-like electronic tensions project into the deepest space.

The turning point comes with “20220302”, the only track also identified by a subtitle (“sarabande”). From this moment on, and for the next four compositions, the stage belongs to Sakamoto and his piano. The electronic inserts disappear, save for sporadic appearances. The horizon brightens and melody takes over. The elegance of “sarabande” drips with regret and resignation. It is the rare moment in which the pain and toil of life are recognizable, alongside its extraordinary beauty.

On April 2, 2023, the long-feared news broke: Ryuichi Sakamoto had died at the age of 71 in Tokyo after a long battle with illness. The announcement of his death, which occurred on March 28, was given to the Japanese press by his management company. Sakamoto had been diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2021. His final album 12 thus stands as his musical testament, evidence of a splendid and provocative courage, embodying the message from the soul of an artist determined to reveal himself once more, after having written and produced some of the most beautiful music of the past fifty years.

Between September 8 and 15, 2022, roughly five months before his death, Ryuichi Sakamoto went to NHK's Studio 509 (Japan's public broadcasting service) to record and film his final piano performances. Numerous sessions spread across several days were needed, as the artist was physically worn down by the illness and the treatments he was undergoing to fight it, and was therefore unable to perform the pieces one after another. The performance took place without an audience, so Opus (2024) is, to all intents and purposes, a studio work, even though it is often classified as a live album, having been presented as a concert film. Opus is the audio version of those sessions (the film's official title, meanwhile, is “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus”).

The twenty tracks on the tracklist (nearly all reinterpretations of his classics, apart from three previously unreleased pieces) stand out for their subdued tone: Sakamoto plays with the lightest touch for more than an hour and a half, even on tracks whose original versions were charged with energy and emphasis. Everything is stripped bare, perhaps as a symbolic sonic rendering of the physical hardships the artist was facing at the time, or of a gradual approach toward silence as a metaphor for death.

To recall a song — one perhaps defined by a layered electronic arrangement and swirling harmonies — and then set it against these few piano notes, in melodic lines that are almost pointillistic, reveals the full sensitivity of a mind that, at different moments in his life, was able to conceive the same work from two seemingly radically different perspectives, both nonetheless firmly rooted in his personal aesthetic.

Sakamoto is, after all, no stranger to this approach: his career, both solo and alongside Yellow Magic Orchestra, has been a continuous reshuffling of his own creations. It's therefore rather fitting that his final gift to the public should consist of yet another revisiting of himself from a different angle - this time, a definitive one.

Contributions by Antonio Ciarletta (“Cendre”) and Gianfranco Marmoro (“Out Of Noise”, “Playing The Piano”), Roberto Mandolini (“Disappearence”), Matteo Meda (“Perpetual”), Michele Palozzo (“async”), Cristiano Orlando (“12”), Federico Romagnoli (“Opus”)

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