Out of Noise: Remembering Ryuichi Sakamoto
The Japanese giant’s career ranged from electronic to orchestral and beyond
Ryuichi Sakamoto is gone—what does that mean?
For starters, considering that his former bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi passed away in January, it means that 2023 is the worst year ever for fans of Japanese synth-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra.
But the keyboardist/composer’s death at 72 on March 28 will undoubtedly also bring a pang of sadness to lovers of alternative music, the avant garde, ambient sounds, dance music, modern classical, jazz fusion, and more, because the titanic talent of Sakamoto was too wide-ranging to ever be tied down to a single mode of musical expression.
The awards, the honors and the other trappings of success stand to show that Sakamoto’s gifts did not go unrecognized, not by any stretch of the imagination. But they’re not what he was about, and they’re not why we’ll miss him. Closer to the bone is the fact that his musical personality was so multi-faceted he could make magic alongside David Sylvian, Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour Japanese jazz-rock guitar hero Kazumi Watanabe and countless other disparate heavyweights.
Attempting to document even his career highlights in as relatively short a space as this would be folly. So, instead of running through a Wikipedia-style laundry list of Sakamoto’s artistic triumphs and commercial achievements over the course of nearly 50 years of work, let’s remember that his music is really a continuum, and wherever you enter it you’ll hear something different. Instead of trying to determine the definitive denizens of the Sakamoto catalog, let’s just dip into a few different moments, mindful that every element of his discography has something to say about who he was.
AUDIO: Yellow Magic Orchestra “Firecracker”
Let’s recall, for instance, that even before the founding of the aforementioned YMO, Sakamoto was already moving in a wildly unconventional direction by making Disappointment-Hateruma, a duo album with experimental percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori full of dischord and discovery in equal amounts.
Let’s remember that he maintained his solo career all through his run with YMO, and that at the same time he was making synth-pop history with that trio’s late-’70s albums he was venturing further afield with records like 1979’s Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto, encompassing not only electro-pop but multiple other shape-shifting electronic forms.
Let’s look back at Sakamoto’s close musical kinship with David Sylvian, which goes back to the former’s live and studio contributions to the latter’s band Japan and extends to Sylvian’s bewitching art-rock solo statements like Brilliant Trees and Secrets of the Beehive, not to mention the pair’s classic 1983 single “Forbidden Colors.”
AUDIO: Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Sylvian “Forbidden Colors”
Let’s then be reminded that the melodic theme from that single was taken from Sakamoto’s celebrated score for the film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, where he masterfully blended the electronic and the orchestral, kicking off a lifetime of evocative film soundtrack work.
Let’s stop and shine a light on Sakamoto’s under-appreciated collaboration with Robin Scott (a.k.a. M of “Pop Muzik” fame) on the sleek, supple slices of New Wave and electronic pop that appeared on the album Left Handed Dream and the EP The Arrangement, with some aid from the otherworldly guitar of Adrian Belew along the way.
And in the midst of it all, let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that we haven’t even gotten past the ‘80s yet, and that the projects mentioned above are only a tiny fraction of the work he created up to that point. Then let’s consider that Sakamoto never let up for the rest of his life, constantly pushing himself to travel into new territory, and amassing a jaw-dropping oeuvre all the way into the 2020s that should by all rights have taken dozens of dynamic auteurs to assemble.
That’s when we might at least begin to really answer the question we began with: Ryuichi Sakamoto is gone—what does that mean?
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