“The decaying and the disappearance of the piano sound is very much symbolic of life and mortality. “I was aware of that theme of mortality in my music since around 2009,” he says. He slips from the mundane to the deathly serious with gentle humour. Talking to Sakamoto in a cafe before the show, his natural urbanity is made calmer still because he speaks slowly and quietly, so as not to irritate his throat.
Heralded as one of the year’s electronic highlights, it is now bolstered by Async Remodels, a set of remixes by the cream of the avant garde, including the Björk collaborator Arca and Oneohtrix Point Never. These themes also appear throughout the 2017 album, Async, Sakamoto’s first solo effort in seven years. Themes of ageing and mortality emerge as Tanaka disappears into the mist he is 72, Nakaya is 84 and Sakamoto is 65 and in recovery from the throat cancer he was diagnosed with in 2014. This performance for the city’s Ultima festival, a collaboration with “fog sculptor” Fujiko Nakaya, is profoundly moving: elegant, nuanced, emotional, rich with cultures from across the globe. As the sun sets, artificial mist billows through the crowd, floodlights suspended from the construction site’s cranes swing above us and the lithe dancer Min Tanaka strikes alarming poses on the parapet of the building, disappearing in and out of the fake clouds. It absorbs me and I wonder if new cultural currents could emerge from this deficiency.O n the roof of a half-built tower block overlooking Oslo’s harbour, Ryuichi Sakamoto – former global pop star, a godfather of techno and hip-hop and an Oscar-winning composer – is in a makeshift plastic shack, coaxing microscopic scratches and scrapes out of a cello, then turning them into huge tonal washes with his laptop. Among these nostalgic clips is an interview from his 1985 documentary Tokyo Melody, in which he muses on what he finds interesting in a rapidly changing Japan: “I’m concerned by a deficient technology. Lawrence, and perform as part of the hugely influential Japanese techno-pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. We see much younger versions of him act alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Woven throughout the documentary are scenes from the films he has scored, as well as footage from his live performances. Listening to the rain with his head in a bucket. He listens to his environment with a playful curiosity, endlessly experimenting with whatever he can find. He improvises on a track playing in the background by running a violin bow across a hi-hat cymbal to unnerving effect. In the film, we see his restless creative energy at work, as he edits and adds to tracks while sitting on an exercise ball in his home studio. This sort of spontaneous fluidity is what has driven most of the composer’s work throughout his decades-long career. “This has happened for the first time in my life.” “He tried to match his film to my music, but I always try to match my music to films,” Sakamoto explained, laughing. Schible spoke of the unexpected surprises of working with Sakamoto, who thrives on improvisation: “Whenever I would have a plan, he would utterly destroy everything I tried to do. My music was too serious for his films”), to being featured on the soundtrack for Call Me By Your Name by director Luca Guadagnino, whom he now considers a friend (“He uses music very carefully, with a lot of respect”). Photo courtesy of MUBI.Īt the Q&A following Coda’s Tribeca Film Festival premiere, Sakamoto sat down with Schible to discuss everything from a meeting with the late Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata (“He fired me. “I wanted this film to explore how Ryuichi’s awareness of crises had developed and how it has brought change to his musical expression.” Sakamoto surveys the damage at Fukushima. “Ultimately, Ryuichi’s composing process became our guide and brought us to the unique form that the film organically acquired,” he recalled. His approach, director Stephen Nomura Schible said, was a major influence on the film. His bout with cancer was the longest he had ever gone without making music just over a year after his diagnosis, he returned to work, this time on the score for Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant.
A film five years in the making, it follows the Oscar-winning composer and activist as he visits the Fukushima nuclear reactor following the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami, then through his 2014 diagnosis with stage three throat cancer, which initially left the direction of the documentary in uncertainty.īut Sakamoto responds to the various crises in his life with a swift matter-of-factness - this is just how things must be done. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is a documentary as composed and improvisational as its subject.
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