Music Sounds The Way It Does Because Of Ryuichi Sakamoto

The story goes that Ryuichi Sakamoto loved this Japanese restaurant in Meri Hill but hated the music played there. So he did what any generous and talented composer would do for generations: he offered to do the director's tracklist. Since then, this myth has become a myth (that is, it has gone a bit viral). But he wasn't a picky eater who didn't like Spotify. He was an artist who imagined a space and thought about how best to fill it with music.

When I met Sakamoto in 2018, he told me that as he got older he only listened to ambient. If it were the natural progression of things, he says, it would inevitably give up the importance of melody and harmony in favor of the ambiguity of texture and tone. "Ambient" can be equated with "background noise" or "cool lo-fi beats". But the contemporary forms that fascinated Sakamoto raise a critical question: What is the relationship between sound and environment?

Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away last week at the age of 71. In addition to being a composer, he was also a renowned pianist, politician and a rare pop star of his time. And while he was never a household name here in the States, there are very few contemporary music genres that don't reflect the influence of Sakamoto's expansive and ever-evolving four-decade career.

I am very sad that he passed away. For those who knew him, he was a New York fixture. I've seen him in the West Village and the Lower East Side, where he often finds himself filming. I waved at him and he responded with a gesture and a mischievous smile, and then he went on to his next task.

© Photo by Alex Rezida

Even as his health deteriorated, Sakamoto never stopped being productive. In 2014 he was diagnosed with throat cancer and soon he wrote his asynchronous masterpiece that ended his entire career. As a product, this is one of Sakamoto's finest, even in a canon defined by technical brilliance. A series of essays, it is a dark and unflinching meditation on mortality, alternating between somber piano pieces and seductive drones.

Earlier this year, he released his latest album, 12, which was recorded between 2021 and spring 2022 after a second cancer diagnosis. Dozens of new instruments are less asynchronous and tighter, and rely heavily on ambient accents. with occasional breaths for a piano melody. Each song didn't have a title but the date it was written - a daily biography.

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But for many, Sakamoto's best-known work is defined by his fun, quirky character and humor. As the public keyboardist for Harumi Hosono's electronic pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, he wasn't as popular as he was in the '70s. An idol with high cheekbones and a peak, it was Sakamoto's polyrhythmic beats that took the group beyond Tokyo. It owes much of its early hip-hop sound to the band's new approach to sampling and looping. And Sakamoto's trick with the Moog and Roland TR-808 synth is you don't get the American or British new wave movement.

Sakamoto's solo recordings have also proved significant and continue to unleash the development potential of his musical material. He pioneered synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines; Though his fame was limited to Japan at the time, his work was integral to pop, electronic, and hip-hop music around the world. He has worked with David Byrne, Iggy Pop and Thomas Dolby. Music historians cite the B-2 Unit's "Riot in Lagos" jam as an extended model for bringing rhythm to popular music. ( The Guardian called it the sixth most important event in dance music history.)

But whoever listens to “Lagos Riot” today hears its influence not only in music, but also in artistic life, which is expressed in flashes and flashes: video games, computer interfaces, ringtones (he composed a lot for Nokia in the early years) . Thanks to the decline in internet context, appreciation for Sakamoto's work has grown over the past decade. Yellow Magic Orchestra's music, along with other artists of the time, has been retrospectively dubbed "Urban Booty" - a Tumblr/YouTube reappraisal of Japanese music in the '70s and '80s, accompanied of course by aesthetic animation videos, entirely unrelated.

While Sakamoto could easily be described as a sonic futurist for his contributions to the use of technology in music, he has always been involved with classical media. As a teenager he was obsessed with the work of Claude Debussy. Sakamoto continued to experiment with pop music throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but he is best known for his film soundtracks. A film buff, he moved to New York and was fascinated by the works of some of Hollywood's greats: De Palma, Almodóvar, Inárritu and Bertolucci, whose film The Last Emperor won Sakamoto an Oscar for Best Original Song in 1987 .

Perhaps his most famous film composition is "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," written for the David Bowie film of the same name (in which Sakamoto makes a brief appearance). He then edited it with vocals for David Sylvian's Forbidden Colors; He later arranged the song instrumentally and performed it until the last public concert. All three recordings are superb and show how Sakamoto's songwriting transcends form - or maybe he was musically gifted in all mediums.

I spoke to him in 2018 before the release of a short documentary about his life. For a former pop icon whose face featured on many album and magazine covers, he was quite shy. ( Ryuichi Sakamoto: He liked coda because it wasn't "too long") I put in a plastic recorder and a spare phone and he started playing with it throughout the interview.

We talked about the film over coffee in a sleepy West Village diner, then he explained his musical philosophy. To be honest, the discussion about people, nature, the relationships between them seemed a bit woo-woo at first. But as he continued, I began to understand what he meant: This relationship is strained. All music is artificial, he said. People make it from natural materials. In fact, art is demeaning to a certain extent. The thought hurt him.

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He still couldn't resist. He admits that this is a contradiction. But I want to create my own sound, create my own music... it's a real passion. How else is he supposed to survive?

Sakamoto has always followed this passion. From the world-renowned techno-pop Yellow Magic Orchestra to his on-site work and in-house experimentation with the playlist he created for this Murray Hill restaurant, his endless curiosity and tireless work ethic have paid off. Sakamoto played early synthesizers, so the music sounds like it does today.

As a film , Koda is less concerned with the reach of Sakamoto's work and thematic relevance to the philosophy of technology and naturalism. At one point in the documentary, seated in front of his Steinway piano, Sakamoto explains that his piano music was only made possible by the Industrial Revolution. The combination of wood and strings and "great power" to create an instrument, technology to create music.

"What emerges from nature shaped by human hands is the sum of the forces of civilization," he says in the film. "Nature must take shape."

This suggests that this form is temporary and over time everything will return to its natural form. That tools - digital or organic - are just tools, existence is a temporary state, if we are lucky while on earth we use these things to do something complex. Ryuichi Sakamoto chose the voice.

Kevin Nguyen is a writer at New Waves and an editor at The Verge. He is a former editor of GQ.

Alva Noto creates the songs