In Minds of: Ryuichi Sakamoto

Caught between the pandemic and a relapse in illness, Sakamoto was unsure when he would be returning home to New York, and so we discussed Time, his 2021 opera, over a Zoom call between time zones. He smiled as he recounted Soseki’s dream of a woman’s rebirth as a flower on her own grave. “It’s so beautiful.”

Sakamoto and I had first met a few years prior, during a productive period of remission for the composer. I’d been invited to his studio for a piece on Coda. Sitting amid a delightful tangle of synthesizers and screens — precisely between a brand-new Buchla, old Prophet, and “The Professor” himself — was admittedly a bit dizzying. All at once, I’d been immersed in the very history of electronic music, yet there we were, in the light of his garden, discussing grand pianos and the sea.

It was the latter that first brought me to Sakamoto’s music. I was living in Tokyo when the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced half a million more, and sent Daiichi into meltdown. Sakamoto was among the few Japanese celebrities speaking up. His perspective, as both an artist and activist, helped me through what I still struggle to fathom: our place within nature and technology, and how we might come to understand one through the other. 

Sakamoto possessed a unique understanding of this dichotomy. A techno-pop pioneer raised between French impressionism and Fluxus, his oeuvre largely reflects art’s own ongoing conflict of “logos and physis, human logic and nature” — a relationship both fraught and fruitful. In the wake of industrialism, for instance, painting was revolutionized by the invention of collapsible tubes — a convenience which brought artists to discover a spectrum of color and light in plein air. And countless mechanisms were created for the piano — from the luthéal to preparations, and eventually the synthesizer — to extract a vibrant palette of microtones from between the black and white keys. 

A few days after my studio visit, Sakamoto invited me to his show in Brooklyn. Using paper, bolts and MIDI, he pushed the piano — just as those had before him — beyond the canon and constructs of man. His hands full of seashells looping through synth, I considered that half century between Debussy’s Reflections on the Water and John Cage’s Water Walk, an experimental fever wherein traditional notation and time had been significantly loosened and freed, expanding our musicality. The piano sat at the center of this storm. Fluxus prompts like Shiomi’s Event for Twilight (1963) asked the artist to steep the instrument in water and play some Liszt; Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants (1968-72) instructs her to set the piano on fire, drown it, as well as plant it in an English garden.

This emancipation is most famously marked by 4’33” (1952), John Cage’s “silent” piece, which set out to prove that silence does not exist. Premiered at an outdoor concert hall deep in the woods of New York, the significance of this composition was not its lack of music but indeed the expansion of it. Cage emptied his score to reveal all that was improvised around them that evening: rain pelting the canopy, the birdsong, growing whispers, and breeze. Instead of imitating nature, it was finally given the stage.  

Born in early 1952, Sakamoto grew up between the aftermath of 4’33” and a sudden revolution in music production, synthesizers, that further disrupted musical time. Throughout his career, from Thousand Knives to 12, his innate curiosity for everyday sounds—of nature as well as the city, music out of time and tune—was emboldened by technology. And from the 2000s, such music became only more asynchronous as he further explored nature in its “manner of operation,” as Cage would say. 

Sakamoto composed between chance and field recordings, time and landscape, with paintings by Kenjiro Okazaki atop his piano. Alongside Carsten Nicolai, he studied and traced the very life of a sound — its attack and decay, sustain and resonance — through sparse yet stirring electronic albums, visualizations and improvisational performances. Working within a minimalist sonic atmosphere, their collaborations mined that in-between of logos and physis, conjuring rain from the static. 

These ideas were expanded further with Shiro Takatani, an artist who excels in visualizing intangible data through installation, an immersive format that Sakamoto came to favor for its complete lack of linear temporality. Using technology to ambitiously consider life, silence, and water, they created installations that deftly sketched the natural sublime — immediate and ineffable. In Is your time, for instance, the world’s daily seismic activity was condensed to notes that could be played by a tsunami-damaged piano recovered from Tohoku. Tuned by the sea, percussive and atonal, the instrument recalled the Pacific itself: beautiful, deep and resonant. 

Just a few months after Sakamoto passed, I joined the premiere of what could be considered his final performance, Kagami. Outfitted with a heavy VR headset, I watched a slightly smaller and virtual Sakamoto perform on a flickering piano. As this image collapsed musician and instrument, I considered his most recent compositions. The piano is light in 12, leaving ample room for the birds outside and his own breath; in Time, it doesn’t exist at all and on the stage of Kagami, it glitches. 

Overwhelmed by this new technology, I enjoyed the rest of the performance without it, opening my ears to what I couldn’t see. But as we left, I lingered on the photographs of Sakamoto streaming on the walls; most of these were portraits I’d seen countless times before, aside from one: the garden piano. After Sakamoto’s studio closed, the piano was relocated to an open field somewhere upstate. And there it remains, leaning into the earth, blooming.

<Read the full feature from Issue Nine>