In early 2022, Ryuichi Sakamoto arrived in Tokyo for a treatment he knew would not cure him. A decade prior, following an initial cancer diagnosis, the pain and stress of chemotherapy had forced Sakamoto into a prolonged absence from recording. When he did come back, his music would never be the same. Throughout this second health emergency, it would change yet again — into something almost without precedent.
During that year, Sakamoto gave very few interviews, withdrawing from public sight for the most part. For the next final twelve months of his life, from the moment of his arrival until his passing in March of the following year, he mustered up all of his remaining strength to pour into the final three albums published under his name during his lifetime — a small, but remarkable trilogy containing some of the most moving and desolate music ever committed to tape.
This is the story of the making and meaning of that small, but significant body of work.
S O U N D
Whispers on
an Infinite Canvas
Tobias Fischer on Time, Space, and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Final Twelve Months.
Written by Tobias Fischer
Ryuichi Sakamoto. Photo by Zakkubalan, 2020. © Kab Inc.
Ryuichi Sakamoto. Photo by Zakkubalan, 2020. © Kab Inc.
January 2022 – March 2022
The first project Sakamoto finished in Tokyo was his new studio album 12. He already recorded several pieces while still in New York, including the long flotation of the opening track “20210310” as well as a couple of free-form piano études. Within and between them, these works introduced the elements that the remainder of the album was comprised of: sustained synthetic strings and heavily reverberated piano, crystalline clusters and short cascades of notes, the cracking and heaving noises of instruments, quite often embedded into spacious, abstracted field recordings. The nature of these recordings remains obscure: late-night traffic noises through an open window? The distant crushing of waves against the shore? It is a music of essentials, simmered down to the purest core.
Sakamoto had decided on a drawing by Lee Ufan for the album artwork — a composition of ascending red, green, and blue lines that overlap into a thick black mass at the heart of the painting. Though there may indeed be a larger spiritual symbolism at work here, the image most likely suggests neither narrative nor representation so much as a constant tension between clarity and opacity, lightness and weight, outward playfulness and hidden darkness. Like the music itself, it hovers, balancing restraint with a certain gravity.
In sound, the compositions contained on 12 seem to reflect this visual accompaniment. Electronic pieces often rely on single swells held for a long time, with harmony occurring only briefly at transitional points. Piano pieces, meanwhile, are filled with fragmented phrases, often separated by endless gaps and extended pauses. Chords never continue into progressions, lingering instead in the air like unanswered questions. Each sound is granted space to exist, and then disappears. For Sakamoto, this choice of a foreboding electro-acoustic palette was never up for question: “I like that coldness (...) and I will not move away from that direction,” he said, “It’s my roots.” [1]
Reception of these pieces, for obvious reasons, was concentrated on the notions of minimalism and space, of resonance and reduction. Sakamoto himself described this new shift in his oeuvre as an initially unconscious tendency to play less and less densely, and more slowly — something which he was made aware of by his friend, composer Dai Fujikura: “It made me think, ‘Why do I want to play much slower than before?’” Sakamoto had pondered. Then, answering his own question, he concluded, “Because I want to hear the resonance. I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it grow, then the next sound, and the next note or harmony can come.” [2]
His reason was not silence, but a resonance where space remains active. The field recordings became a canvas for this resonance to unfold, for each note to arrive, present itself, and then die away again. This logic already guided earlier projects such as his masterpiece async, recorded with his friend Carsten Nicola (aka Alva Noto). “An artist’s initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer often diminishes the work’s aura,” Sakamoto observed when discussing async. “When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back. (...) I decided to pay very close attention to when to let go of my brush for every single track.” [3] Knowing when to stop, to let a sound end in, was something just as important as deciding where to begin.
The first project Sakamoto finished in Tokyo was his new studio album 12. He already recorded several pieces while still in New York, including the long flotation of the opening track “20210310” as well as a couple of free-form piano études. Within and between them, these works introduced the elements that the remainder of the album was comprised of: sustained synthetic strings and heavily reverberated piano, crystalline clusters and short cascades of notes, the cracking and heaving noises of instruments, quite often embedded into spacious, abstracted field recordings. The nature of these recordings remains obscure: late-night traffic noises through an open window? The distant crushing of waves against the shore? It is a music of essentials, simmered down to the purest core.
Sakamoto had decided on a drawing by Lee Ufan for the album artwork — a composition of ascending red, green, and blue lines that overlap into a thick black mass at the heart of the painting. Though there may indeed be a larger spiritual symbolism at work here, the image most likely suggests neither narrative nor representation so much as a constant tension between clarity and opacity, lightness and weight, outward playfulness and hidden darkness. Like the music itself, it hovers, balancing restraint with a certain gravity.
In sound, the compositions contained on 12 seem to reflect this visual accompaniment. Electronic pieces often rely on single swells held for a long time, with harmony occurring only briefly at transitional points. Piano pieces, meanwhile, are filled with fragmented phrases, often separated by endless gaps and extended pauses. Chords never continue into progressions, lingering instead in the air like unanswered questions. Each sound is granted space to exist, and then disappears. For Sakamoto, this choice of a foreboding electro-acoustic palette was never up for question: “I like that coldness (...) and I will not move away from that direction,” he said, “It’s my roots.” [1]
Reception of these pieces, for obvious reasons, was concentrated on the notions of minimalism and space, of resonance and reduction. Sakamoto himself described this new shift in his oeuvre as an initially unconscious tendency to play less and less densely, and more slowly — something which he was made aware of by his friend, composer Dai Fujikura: “It made me think, ‘Why do I want to play much slower than before?’” Sakamoto had pondered. Then, answering his own question, he concluded, “Because I want to hear the resonance. I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it grow, then the next sound, and the next note or harmony can come.” [2]
His reason was not silence, but a resonance where space remains active. The field recordings became a canvas for this resonance to unfold, for each note to arrive, present itself, and then die away again. This logic already guided earlier projects such as his masterpiece async, recorded with his friend Carsten Nicola (aka Alva Noto). “An artist’s initial broad stroke is always most impactful, and obsessively adding layer upon layer often diminishes the work’s aura,” Sakamoto observed when discussing async. “When an aura is lost, it is impossible to get back. (...) I decided to pay very close attention to when to let go of my brush for every single track.” [3] Knowing when to stop, to let a sound end in, was something just as important as deciding where to begin.
Lee Ufan, artwork for Ryuichi Sakamoto, 12, 2023. © Lee Ufan.
Late 2022
Following the highly acclaimed release and universal acclaim of 12, Sakamoto entered Studio 509 at the NHK Broadcast Center in Tokyo — which, in his opinion, offered the best acoustics in Japan — with his son, director and screenwriter Neo Sora. The basic concept for their project that would become Opus was straight-forward: to capture a final performance by Sakamoto while he was still physically able to play. The execution, however, was anything but simple. Sora mapped out the shoot with detailed attention to light, pacing, and camera movement. Sakamoto is seated solo at a grand piano throughout, filmed from various angles that shift almost imperceptibly between pieces, with subtle but impactful changes in lighting that mimic the flow of time in a day, a narrative arc progressing “from morning into night.”
Repertoire-wise, Opus offered a familiar selection of his very best work. Yet the performance itself was like no other, markedly different from earlier recordings so carefully rehearsed and meticulously refined. For many artists, Opus left them in awe. For American-Iranian singer Shab, the stripped-down rendition of “Forbidden Colors” was disarming, revealing an emotional undercurrent that made her “understand the bone-deep sadness and longing underpinning that composition.” For singer Tristan Carter-Jones, “its longing, its mournfulness, its hope” was like a shield, as if providing shelter from the inescapability of death. Composer Simon Fisher-Turner responded to the same elements from a different angle: “It’s just piano and just so simple,” he noted, “It’s interesting because two things come to mind. You hear Sakamoto breathing quite heavily on what is his last album and then you hear Bowie on his last album, also going ‘Hhhhhhhh…’ and it’s like, ‘Wow.’”
Following the highly acclaimed release and universal acclaim of 12, Sakamoto entered Studio 509 at the NHK Broadcast Center in Tokyo — which, in his opinion, offered the best acoustics in Japan — with his son, director and screenwriter Neo Sora. The basic concept for their project that would become Opus was straight-forward: to capture a final performance by Sakamoto while he was still physically able to play. The execution, however, was anything but simple. Sora mapped out the shoot with detailed attention to light, pacing, and camera movement. Sakamoto is seated solo at a grand piano throughout, filmed from various angles that shift almost imperceptibly between pieces, with subtle but impactful changes in lighting that mimic the flow of time in a day, a narrative arc progressing “from morning into night.”
Repertoire-wise, Opus offered a familiar selection of his very best work. Yet the performance itself was like no other, markedly different from earlier recordings so carefully rehearsed and meticulously refined. For many artists, Opus left them in awe. For American-Iranian singer Shab, the stripped-down rendition of “Forbidden Colors” was disarming, revealing an emotional undercurrent that made her “understand the bone-deep sadness and longing underpinning that composition.” For singer Tristan Carter-Jones, “its longing, its mournfulness, its hope” was like a shield, as if providing shelter from the inescapability of death. Composer Simon Fisher-Turner responded to the same elements from a different angle: “It’s just piano and just so simple,” he noted, “It’s interesting because two things come to mind. You hear Sakamoto breathing quite heavily on what is his last album and then you hear Bowie on his last album, also going ‘Hhhhhhhh…’ and it’s like, ‘Wow.’”
Ryuichi Sakamoto, Monster (Motion Picture Soundtrack), 2023. Cover photograph by Makoto Suenaga.
Art direction and design by Rikako Nagashima. © commmons / Avex Entertainment.
January 2023 – February 2023
Opus was an artistic triumph and even achieved moderate commercial success, earning almost three-quarters of a million dollars in ticket sales at the box office. For Sakamoto, however, the ambition of and stress from the project exacted a significant toll on his already depleting energy reserves. His condition deteriorated in the weeks that followed, limiting his ability to undertake new work. It was for this reason that Sakamoto was unable to commit to a soundtrack commission by director Hirokazu Kore-eda for the movie Monster. However, Kore-eda was convinced that Sakamoto’s music was the right choice for the film, and the two eventually found a compromise.
Rather than composing a full original soundtrack, Sakamoto assembled already existing material from earlier albums 12, Out of Noise, and BTTB, alongside two new pieces composed specifically for the film. Sakamoto always emphasised the collaborative nature of his soundtrack work, and one therefore can’t help but feel that Monster is like a capsule version of his entire oeuvre, where all pieces segue and flow together seamlessly.
Perhaps most moving is the change in tone between the earlier works and the two new pieces. The opening “20220207” off 12 remains harmonically unsettling and frightfully bleak, the left hand tracing a broken chord while the right hand plays a beguiling splinter of glassy notes on top, searching for a resolution that doesn’t come. By contrast, the newly composed works, simply titled “Monster 1” and “Monster 2,” suggest a softening acceptance. Harmonic language becomes more fluid, and tension is gently eased. These gestures recall, even, the works of Debussy, forever Sakamoto’s favourite composer.
The resonance of space may indeed be the most immediately obvious trait of these final pieces: sustained tones, long decays, resonance over density. But space alone does not account for what these pieces are truly about. It is time, really, that shapes these works as the medium through which they truly express themselves. Fundamentally, this concern is not specific to Sakamoto, as guitarist David Torn has explained: “Every musician — in the current worlds of music, especially — is concerned with talking about and utilizing time: There’s no music without time; even arhythmic, non-metrically-marked pieces depend upon time as the partner to space; every breath of phrasing, even playing rubato or freely, conveys the relationship of human life with time.”
In his final works, space acts as a resonant canvas for the passage of time. Sakamoto’s music makes this interrelationship audible in a very particular manner: that, in reduction, the essential qualities of time, space, and sound are all laid bare. The sparse notes of 12, the measured breaths of Opus, and the curated flow of Monster all make time into something palpable. In pause and in space, his hands are held up. As if to take a last look back, as if to wave goodbye. The time in music, and the time of life.
Opus was an artistic triumph and even achieved moderate commercial success, earning almost three-quarters of a million dollars in ticket sales at the box office. For Sakamoto, however, the ambition of and stress from the project exacted a significant toll on his already depleting energy reserves. His condition deteriorated in the weeks that followed, limiting his ability to undertake new work. It was for this reason that Sakamoto was unable to commit to a soundtrack commission by director Hirokazu Kore-eda for the movie Monster. However, Kore-eda was convinced that Sakamoto’s music was the right choice for the film, and the two eventually found a compromise.
Rather than composing a full original soundtrack, Sakamoto assembled already existing material from earlier albums 12, Out of Noise, and BTTB, alongside two new pieces composed specifically for the film. Sakamoto always emphasised the collaborative nature of his soundtrack work, and one therefore can’t help but feel that Monster is like a capsule version of his entire oeuvre, where all pieces segue and flow together seamlessly.
Perhaps most moving is the change in tone between the earlier works and the two new pieces. The opening “20220207” off 12 remains harmonically unsettling and frightfully bleak, the left hand tracing a broken chord while the right hand plays a beguiling splinter of glassy notes on top, searching for a resolution that doesn’t come. By contrast, the newly composed works, simply titled “Monster 1” and “Monster 2,” suggest a softening acceptance. Harmonic language becomes more fluid, and tension is gently eased. These gestures recall, even, the works of Debussy, forever Sakamoto’s favourite composer.
The resonance of space may indeed be the most immediately obvious trait of these final pieces: sustained tones, long decays, resonance over density. But space alone does not account for what these pieces are truly about. It is time, really, that shapes these works as the medium through which they truly express themselves. Fundamentally, this concern is not specific to Sakamoto, as guitarist David Torn has explained: “Every musician — in the current worlds of music, especially — is concerned with talking about and utilizing time: There’s no music without time; even arhythmic, non-metrically-marked pieces depend upon time as the partner to space; every breath of phrasing, even playing rubato or freely, conveys the relationship of human life with time.”
In his final works, space acts as a resonant canvas for the passage of time. Sakamoto’s music makes this interrelationship audible in a very particular manner: that, in reduction, the essential qualities of time, space, and sound are all laid bare. The sparse notes of 12, the measured breaths of Opus, and the curated flow of Monster all make time into something palpable. In pause and in space, his hands are held up. As if to take a last look back, as if to wave goodbye. The time in music, and the time of life.
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani async–immersion tokyo, 2024
©2024 KAB Inc.
Photo: Takeshi Asano.
©2024 KAB Inc.
Photo: Takeshi Asano.
January 2023 – March 2023
In the final months of his life, Sakamoto finished Kagami, a multimedia, virtual concert performance developed with Todd Eckert. The project was to bring audiences closer than ever to Sakamoto’s art by translating existing modes of performance into a mediated form.
Simultaneously, preparations for the Ambient 2023 festival were underway, where an immersive version of async was installed. As keyboardist Yumiko Ohno observed: “It was a three-dimensional sound exhibition in a large atrium space, with ultra-high-resolution images by Shiro Takatani projected on a large horizontal screen nearly 30 meters long.” It was, for her, “a wonderful work of stillness, beauty, and even madness.”
Time did not operate as a generative resource in these last projects. Sakamoto did not extend his practice through new compositional materials or expand the narrative of his work. Rather, these virtual formats preserved the gesture of his being, no matter the absence of physical presence, leaving a trace behind. As composition gave way to installation, and performance to mediation, Sakamoto’s presence became one ultimately untethered from the bounds of physical time.
His last words, shared as an introduction to Kagami, were a string of questions: "There is, in reality, a virtual me. This virtual me will not age, and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries. Will there be humans then? Will the squids that will conquer the earth after humanity listen to me? What will pianos be to them? What about music? Will there be empathy there?" [5]
Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away on March 28, 2023. But the sound of his music never ended. Though his final works do not offer resolution nor transcendence, they reveal a sound stripped to essentials, a presence no longer anchored to the moment of performance. The notes linger, resonate, then withdraw, and leave duration itself as the final condition of listening.
[1] https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/stranger-in-a-strange-world/1043
[2] https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ryuichi-sakamoto-on-how-your-work-changes-as-you-get-older/
[3] https://steemit.com/ryuichi/@mrbrendanjay/ryuichi-sakamoto-interview
[4] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-beautiful-unpredictable-life-of-ryuichi-sakamoto
[5] https://www.theshed.org/program/299-kagami-by-ryuichi-sakamoto-and-tin-drum
In the final months of his life, Sakamoto finished Kagami, a multimedia, virtual concert performance developed with Todd Eckert. The project was to bring audiences closer than ever to Sakamoto’s art by translating existing modes of performance into a mediated form.
Simultaneously, preparations for the Ambient 2023 festival were underway, where an immersive version of async was installed. As keyboardist Yumiko Ohno observed: “It was a three-dimensional sound exhibition in a large atrium space, with ultra-high-resolution images by Shiro Takatani projected on a large horizontal screen nearly 30 meters long.” It was, for her, “a wonderful work of stillness, beauty, and even madness.”
Time did not operate as a generative resource in these last projects. Sakamoto did not extend his practice through new compositional materials or expand the narrative of his work. Rather, these virtual formats preserved the gesture of his being, no matter the absence of physical presence, leaving a trace behind. As composition gave way to installation, and performance to mediation, Sakamoto’s presence became one ultimately untethered from the bounds of physical time.
His last words, shared as an introduction to Kagami, were a string of questions: "There is, in reality, a virtual me. This virtual me will not age, and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries. Will there be humans then? Will the squids that will conquer the earth after humanity listen to me? What will pianos be to them? What about music? Will there be empathy there?" [5]
Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away on March 28, 2023. But the sound of his music never ended. Though his final works do not offer resolution nor transcendence, they reveal a sound stripped to essentials, a presence no longer anchored to the moment of performance. The notes linger, resonate, then withdraw, and leave duration itself as the final condition of listening.
[1] https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/stranger-in-a-strange-world/1043
[2] https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/ryuichi-sakamoto-on-how-your-work-changes-as-you-get-older/
[3] https://steemit.com/ryuichi/@mrbrendanjay/ryuichi-sakamoto-interview
[4] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-beautiful-unpredictable-life-of-ryuichi-sakamoto
[5] https://www.theshed.org/program/299-kagami-by-ryuichi-sakamoto-and-tin-drum