The Brooklyn Rail

“Debussy used to say he liked images as much as music.” It’s 1984, and Ryuichi Sakamoto is riding around town with filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard as she shoots Tokyo Melody, a portrait of the Japanese composer at the height of his fame. Between half-smiles and cigarettes, he ruminates on art and technology, answers oui and hai to unheard questions, then sits down at the Fairlight CMI digital audio workstation. “This is time. I’m making a loop.” He scribbles something on the screen and points to the image: an undulating wave of green. “In fact,” he hesitates, “… it’s more complicated.”

I put on Tokyo Melody when the news broke of Sakamoto’s death this spring. It’s not the most comprehensive documentary of the artist (for this, look to 2017’s meditative Coda) but I wanted to see Sakamoto in his youth, looking and likely feeling a little immortal. A global superstar at thirty-two, the film finds him pouring a diversity of styles, talent, and cutting-edge equipment into the solo album Ongaku Zukan (Music Picture Book). He quotes Debussy in coy French between studio sessions, playing with the story that Sakamoto once believed himself to be the reincarnation of the impressionist composer—to the point of memorizing his signature. And although Ryuichi Sakamoto would make something of his own name, this muscle memory of Debussy’s lived on in his creative disregard for boundaries, not only for those illusory delineations between east and west or art and music, but ultimately between the past and future, space as well as time.

Perhaps because “Clair de Lune” is so lovely, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary the French composer was. Motivated by the poets and painters around him, as well as the arts from Japan to Java, Debussy liberated European music from Wagnerism, pioneering organic forms and opening it to silence, “a device,” he once wrote, that was “rare [but] perhaps the only way of bringing out the emotion of a phrase.” Satie would expand on this revelation and later John Cage, whose 4’ 33” reset music history in 1952. Born that same year, Sakamoto proudly considered himself a “baby of silence” and indeed, despite the cacophony of mid-century Tokyo, had his young ears opened by it. He was only ten when his mother took him to Sogetsu Hall to hear Yuji Takahashi, an early pioneer in the development of computer music and multimedia sound art that soon became seminal to Sakamoto’s budding creative life.

In A History in Music, Sakamoto locates his early admiration for Takahashi in his visual methodology, his way of “drawing” music “from the basics of shape, such as circles, triangles, straight lines, points.” From early on, Sakamoto was a starkly visual musician who, like Debussy, fell in with artists. As a music student at the prestigious Tokyo University of the Arts, he frequently skipped composition to sneak into art classes, including that of Jiro Takamatsu—a key figure of the Mono-ha movement, a “School of Things” exploring the natural and artificial materiality of objects. Largely led by Korean artist Lee Ufan, whom Sakamoto would collaborate with decades later, Mono-ha rejected authorship, the growing art market, and western influence. And if Takahashi showed Sakamoto how to see sound, it was Mono-ha that taught the young composer how to listen to everything he saw.

Mono-ha honed Sakamoto’s understanding of sound’s relation to object and the individual to nature, informing his early composition, Dispersion, Boundary, Sand in 1976. Aki Takahashi—Yuji’s sister, an exquisite pianist famous for her Satie concerts—performed its premiere. Utilizing a prepared piano and lines of Foucault, it earned the praise of one very notable concertgoer, Toru Takemitsu, who told Sakamoto he had “a good ear” (quotations are primarily drawn from the Japanese publications Onbeat and Bijutsu Techo). After graduation Sakamoto worked tirelessly as a studio musician and arranger, finding some time to collaborate with artists from his multi-media performance troupe, Gakushudan (“Study Group”), and experiment with the latest synths. In 1978, this culminated in a sprawling electronic performance, “Memories of Nazca (Anti-Oneiric Device or Music as a Function of Anti-Collectivism)” the piece which famously led to Sakamoto joining Yellow Magic Orchestra, and his first album, Thousand Knives, a fever dream gleaned from five-hundred sleepless studio hours, a book by Henri Michaux, and a cutting-edge Roland TR-808 drum machine. Only a few weeks later Sakamoto would release his first record with YMO, altering his life forever.

From 1978 to 1984, Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Sakamoto toured the world as Yellow Magic Orchestra. Feeling hostile to fame and YMO, however, Sakamoto continued to release his own solo albums like B-2 Unit, among the most influential records in electronic music, and took on new projects. In 1983, he starred opposite David Bowie in Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a wartime drama featuring Sakamoto’s first foray into acting and film scoring. His visual intuition as a composer was perfectly suited to film, and he’d spend the next four decades writing award-winning scores for directors like Bernardo Bertolucci, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Pedro Almodóvar.

By the time YMO disbanded in 1984, Sakamoto was a cultural icon of such prominence that Andy Warhol had immortalized him in a series of lithographs. Despite the distractions of celebrity, however, this was among the most fruitful, experimental, and deeply collaborative years for him. He’d finally released Ongaku Zukan, an album that became his first major solo hit in Japan; improvising on the latest synth and samplers, the album#146;s new technologies realized Sakamoto’s visions of a time that was “no longer linear.” He had also just met the father of video art and inventor of the video synthesizer, Nam June Paik, an artist who shared his interest in collaging time, merging sound and vision, and generally making everything—art, music, the world itself—more accessible.

Paik and Sakamoto’s connection was immediate, as celebrated in the meandering jazz of Ongaku Zukan’s “Tribute to N.J.P.” and Paik’s own All Star Video (1984), which stars Sakamoto and his music alongside icons like Cage, Laurie Anderson, and Allen Ginsberg. They would further collaborate on Paik’s ambitious live television specials Bye Bye Kipling (1986) and Wrap Around the World (1988), wildly entertaining programs that were broadcast worldwide via satellite. Playing host as frequently as performer, Sakamoto is seen conducting an Okinawan shamisen trio, toasting Dick Cavett, or politely listening to David Bowie’s staccato Japanese in between footage of protests, choreography, or a game of elephant soccer.

Sakamoto liked to call 1984 the “first year of performance” in Tokyo; all music, art, and literature seemed to have collapsed into each other and he thrived in the intermedia atmosphere. In a nod to the family trade, as well as his early mentors, Sakamoto published two art books that year: the Honhondo Unpublished Book Catalog, which presented unpublished book designs by ten artists, including his former art teacher, Takamatsu; and Long Phone, a collaboration with Yuji Takahashi gleaned from their phone calls. On publishing day, Sakamoto turned the latter into a performance piece called “The Gray Wall,” wherein he spent seven hours pasting copies of the book’s cover to the wall of the Shibuya PARCO department store before declaring: “This is also a book.” The following spring, he and Yuji Takahashi also collaborated with NOISE—the intrepid theater group led by playwright Koharu Kisaragi—on “Matthew 1985,” a multimedia reinterpretation of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

Such kaleidoscopic projects captured an idealism characteristic of the late century, heard in Sakamoto’s next solo album, Esperanto (1985). Written to accompany a performance by avant-garde choreographer Molissa Fenley, Esperanto expanded on Sakamoto’s passion for world music in hand with his growing awareness of the natural world. The album was also adapted as a video art piece, Adelic Penguins (1985), by Kit Fitzgerald and Paul Garrin. Collaging images of the Arctic and Guadalcanal under Esperanto’s gleefully fragmented Tower of Babel, it premiered on the world’s first Jumbotron at the 1985 world’s fair. Expansive in scope and scale, this vision would be carried into another solo album, 1989’s peripatetic Beauty, and ultimately peak in the 1999 opera, LIFE—an ambitious multimedia performance tackling the fading century in the midst of a growing anxiety toward the next.

LIFE earned mixed reviews, yet launched what would be a decades-long creative relationship between Sakamoto and the opera’s visual supervisor, Shiro Takatani. Takatani is a leading audio-visual artist and the cofounder of Dumb Type, a multimedia art collective formed in the early ’80s out of growing concerns around technology, nature, and society—concerns that increasingly mirrored Sakamoto’s. As the century turned, he began to compose music about bacteria and DNA and ice and water. All at once, Sakamoto’s thoughts had turned from seemingly everything to every thing.

In 2007, Takatani and Sakamoto began to adapt these ideas to the exhibition space. Their “installation music,” as Sakamoto called the format, integrated his compositions into Takatani’s images through installations of water, fog, and video projection, like LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible … (2007) and Plankton (2016). Sakamoto found the spatiality of this media liberating and continued to flesh out these ideas alongside sound and multimedia artists like Daito Manabe, Yuko Mohri, and electronic musician Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto) with whom he collaborated frequently, most notably on Glass (2018)—an improvisation using the very walls of Philip Johnson’s Glass House.

These years were productive yet tumultuous. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami deeply traumatized Japan, and Sakamoto became a central force in the anti-nuclear movement and one of the few celebrities to speak out. Following a diagnosis of throat cancer, however, he was forced to take a sabbatical in New York where, like the pantheistic daydreams of Debussy, “mysterious Nature” seemed to have become his religion; yet living in the West Village, this applied not only to “…the sounds of rain and wind [but] pebbles on the street.” He recorded constantly, like a “child obsessed with collecting insects,” garnering material for his first solo album in eight years, async (2017). A tapestry of rolling synth, ethereal chorales, and field recordings, async is an investigation of asynchronism, music outside traditional time structures.

Async was adapted to installations such as IS YOUR TIME, which included one of the album’s most chilling primary sources, a piano Sakamoto recovered from the 2011 tsunami debris in Tōhoku. Still bearing the scars of water and earth, the instrument was rigged to a device that transmitted live seismic data into the piano’s action, allowing the world itself to play this piano that, Sakamoto found, was “tuned by nature.” Arguably the most powerful artwork in Sakamoto’s oeuvre, the tsunami piano exists as both evidence and echo. In the tinny resonance of its waterlogged keys are the bleached and abandoned coasts of Tōhoku as well as the cyclical nature of life and art; who can forget Debussy’s La Mer, written from landlocked Paris and yet inspired by Hokusai’s The Great Wave (1831).

After visiting an installation of async, Lee Ufan invited Sakamoto to compose music for his own exhibition at the Center Pompidou Metz, Inhabiting Time (2019). Employing metal, glass, and stones, Sakamoto created “a Mono-ha of sound” for the artist. Their collaboration seems to have further inspired Sakamoto’s own 2020S “Art Box Project,” a collection of music composed by the sound of pottery Sakamoto painted and then broke. Each pottery shard, boxed alongside the music, thus became a fragment of time, adorned, destroyed, and then pinned as elegantly as a butterfly in a shadow box.

In early 2021, news broke of Sakamoto’s colorectal cancer diagnosis and within the year it would spread to his lungs. Despite his poor prognosis and the pandemic that further isolated him, Sakamoto continued to work and collaborate with cutting-edge technologies and artists. In the spring of 2021, he and Takatani premiered the theater piece, TIME, a haunting mugen noh—a type of noh theater set in dreams—about man, nature, and reincarnation. Soon after, Sakamoto became an official member of Dumb Type, participating in their landmark exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale.

These final years were increasingly exploratory. Sakamoto contributed music to A Conversation with the Sun, a stirring virtual reality installation by filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and KAGAMI, the mixed reality concert released posthumously with the intermedia group Tin Drum. Meaning “mirror” in Japanese, KAGAMI presented an uncannily animated Sakamoto performing at his piano. “This virtual me will not age,” he wrote in the press release earlier this year, “and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries…” But he wavers. “Ah, but the batteries won’t last that long.”

“Since I have made it this far in life,” Sakamoto wrote in an article for the literary magazine Shinchō last year, “I hope to be able to make music until my last moment, like Bach and Debussy whom I adore.” Sakamoto’s final album, 12, was released on his seventy-first birthday and only a few months before his death. Improvisational, its sketches were composed at the keyboard with memories of his youth and daily sounds from the “neighboring households … the crows … the noise of chairs.” In a final collaboration, Lee Ufan created the album’s artwork: a stream of gestural red and green bands isolated, aligned, and then merged; the work itself appears to be a sketch of Ufan’s more recent “Dialogue” paintings, the layered brushstrokes of which are aligned with each of the artist’s breaths—a moving gesture as Sakamoto’s own labored breathing keeps time beneath 12.

The human condition can push the body, despite itself, to make one last mark on the page. Bach completed a nameless Mass even as he went blind, and Debussy wrote one more sonata on his deathbed, dying of cancer under the fire of German artillery. Sakamoto never seemed so fixated on endings or beginnings, however—simply the present, a state of being that’s timeless.