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lead=yes was a Japanese musician, composer, keyboardist, record producer, singer and actor. He pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of the Synthesizer-based band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his YMO bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto influenced and pioneered a number of electronic music genres. As a film score composer, Sakamoto won an Academy Awards (Oscar), BAFTA, Grammy Award and two Golden Globe Awards.
Sakamoto began his career as a session musician, producer, and arranger while he was at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in the mid 1970s. His first major success came in 1978 as co-founder of YMO. He pursued a solo career at the same time, releasing the experimental electronic fusion album Thousand Knives in that year, and the album B-2 Unit in 1980. B-2 Unit includes the track "Riot in Lagos", which had a significant influence on the development of electro, hip hop and dance music. He went on to produce more solo records, and collaborate with many international artists, including David Sylvian, DJ Spooky, Carsten Nicolai, Youssou N'Dour, and Fennesz. Sakamoto composed music for the opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympic Games, and his composition "Energy Flow" (1999) was the first instrumental number-one single in Japan's Oricon charts history.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) marked his debut as both an actor and a film score composer; its main theme was adapted into the single "Forbidden Colours" which became an international hit. His most successful work as a film composer was The Last Emperor (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, making him the first Japanese composer to win an Academy Award. He continued earning accolades composing for films such as The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993), and The Revenant (2015). On occasion, Sakamoto also worked as a composer and a scenario writer on anime and video games. He was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the Ministry of Culture of France in 2009 for his contributions to music. Sakamoto died on March 28, 2023 from colorectal cancer at the age of 71.
He discovered jazz and rock and roll as a teenager, when he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels. He was also influenced by jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and by rock bands such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. He described his political leanings during his time as a student as “not a 100 percent Marxist, but kind of”. At the height of the Japanese student protest movement, he and Yasuhisa Shiozaki along with dozens of other classmates barricaded themselves in their high school principals's office, seeking changes to the way the school was run.
Sakamoto entered the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1970, earning a B.A. in music composition in 1974 and a M.A. in 1976, with special emphasis on both electronic and ethnic music. He studied ethnomusicology there with the intention of becoming a researcher in the field, due to his interest in various world music traditions, particularly the Japanese, Okinawan music, Indian, Indonesian and African musical traditions. He was also trained in classical music and began experimenting with the electronic music equipment available at the university, including synthesizers such as the Buchla, Moog synthesizer, and ARP.
In mid-1978, Sakamoto released his first solo album Thousand Knives, with the help of Hideki Matsutake—Hosono also contributed to the song "Thousand Knives". The album experimented with different styles, such as "Thousand Knives" and "The End of Asia"—in which electronic music was fused with traditional Japanese music—while "Grasshoppers" is a more minimalistic piano song. The album was recorded from April to July 1978 with a variety of electronic musical instruments, including various synthesizers, such as the KORG PS-3100, a polyphonic synthesizer; the Oberheim Eight Voice; the Moog synthesizer; the Polymoog, the Minimoog; the Micromoog; the Korg VC-10, which is a vocoder; the KORG SQ-10, which is an analog sequencer; the Pollard Syndrum, an electronic drum kit; and the microprocessor-based Roland MC-8 Microcomposer, which is a music sequencer that was programmed by Matsutake and played by Sakamoto.
According to Dusted Magazine, Sakamoto's use of squelching Bounce music sounds and mechanical beats was later incorporated in early electro and hip hop productions, such as "Message II (Survival)" by Melle Mel and Duke Bootee (1982), "Magic's Wand" (1982) by Whodini and Thomas Dolby, "Electric Kingdom" (1983) by Twilight 22, and The Album (1985) by Mantronix. The 1980 release of "Riot in Lagos" was listed by The Guardian in 2011 as one of the 50 key important events in the history of dance music, at number six on its list. Resident Advisor said the track anticipated the sounds of techno and hip hop music, and that it inspired numerous artists from cities such as Tokyo, New York City and Detroit. Peter Tasker of Nikkei Asia said it was influential on techno, hip hop and house music.
One of the tracks on B-2 Unit, "Differencia" has, according to Fact, "relentless tumbling beats and a stabbing bass synth that foreshadows Oldschool jungle by nearly a decade". Some tracks on the album also foreshadow genres such as IDM, broken beat, and industrial techno, and the work of producers such as Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never. For several tracks on the album, Sakamoto worked with UK reggae producer Dennis Bovell, incorporating elements of Afrobeat and dub music. According to Pitchfork, " B-2 Unit still sounds futuristic" with tracks such as "E-3A" looking "ahead to Mouse on Mars’ idyllic ’90s electronica."
Also in 1980, Sakamoto released the single "War Head/Lexington Queen", an experimental synthpop and electro record. His collaboration with Kiyoshiro Imawano, "Ikenai Rouge Magic", also topped the Oricon singles chart. ( Translation) Sakamoto also began a long-standing collaboration with David Sylvian, when he co-wrote and performed on the Japan track "Taking Islands in Africa" in 1980.
In 1981, Sakamoto collaborated with Talking Heads and King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew and Robin Scott for an album titled Left-Handed Dream. According to The Baffler, the album combined "slow, simmering, primeval" techno with "sprawling, raw-edged sci-fi gagaku" using traditional Japanese taiko drums.
Sakamoto worked on another collaboration with Sylvian, a single entitled "Bamboo Houses" in 1982. The song "Bamboo Houses" in particular "accidentally predicted" grime music according to Fact magazine, calling it "the earliest example of proto-grime" with similarities to the Sinogrime subgenre which Wiley and Jammer were known for in the 2000s. Sakamoto's earlier 1978 songs "Grasshoppers" and "The End of Asia" from Thousand Knives also have melodic lines similar to grime or Sinogrime.
Sakamoto began work on his next album Ongaku Zukan in 1982, but it didn't release until 1984. During production, he was one of the first musicians to use the Yamaha DX7, the same year the digital synthesizer released in 1983. He initially used the DX7 for Mari Iijima's debut city pop album Rosé, released in 1983, before using it for his solo album Ongaku Zukan, which eventually released in 1984.
Sakamoto broadened his musical range with a number of solo albums such Ongaku Zukan (1984), Neo Geo (1987), and Beauty (1989). These albums included collaborations with artists such as Thomas Dolby, Iggy Pop, Youssou N'Dour, and Brian Wilson.
In 1985, Sakamoto was commissioned to score a dance composition by New York choreographer Molissa Fenley called Esperanto. The performance itself debuted at the Joyce Theater, to mixed reviews from Anna Kisselgoff at The New York Times which said of Sakamoto's music, that "The sound often resembles a radio shut on and off." The score was subsequently released in Japan by Midi, Inc., and includes contributions from Arto Lindsay and YAS-KAZ. Jen Monroe of The Baffler said the sample-based music "manages to be unremittingly gorgeous, aggressive, angular, and lush."
In 1995, Sakamoto released Smoochy, described by the Sound on Sound website as Sakamoto's "excursion into the land of easy-listening and Latin", followed by the 1996 album, which featured a number of previously released pieces arranged for solo piano, violin, and cello. During December 1996 Sakamoto, composed the entirety of an hour-long orchestral work entitled "Untitled 01" and released as the album Discord (1998). The Sony Classical release of Discord was sold in a jewel case that was covered by a blue-colored slipcase made of Metal leaf, while the CD also contained a data video track. In 1998 the Ninja Tune record label released the Prayer/Salvation Remixes, for which prominent electronica artists such as Ashley Beedle and Andrea Parker remixed sections from the "Prayer" and "Salvation" parts of Discord. Sakamoto collaborated primarily with guitarist David Torn and DJ Spooky—artist Laurie Anderson provides spoken word on the composition—and the recording was condensed from nine live performances of the work, recorded during a Japanese tour. Discord was divided into four parts: "Grief", "Anger", "Prayer", and "Salvation"; Sakamoto explained in 1998 that he was "not religious, but maybe spiritual" and "The Prayer is to anybody or anything you want to name." Sakamoto further explained:
In 1998, Italian ethnomusicologist Massimo Milano published Ryuichi Sakamoto. Conversazioni through the Padova, Arcana imprint. All three editions of the book were published in the Italian language. Sakamoto's next album, BTTB (1999)—an acronym for "Back to the Basics" is comprised a series of original pieces on solo piano influenced by Claude Debussy and Erik Satie and includes "Energy Flow" (a major hit in Japan) and an arrangement of the Yellow Magic Orchestra classic "Tong Poo".
Sakamoto's long-awaited "opera" was released in 1999, with visual direction by Shiro Takatani, artistic director of Dumb Type. This ambitious multi-genre multi-media project featured contributions from Pina Bausch, Bernardo Bertolucci, Josep Carreras, the Dalai Lama, and Salman Rushdie. In 2007, they "deconstructed" all the visual images and the sound, to create an art installation.
Sakamoto teamed with cellist Jaques Morelenbaum and singer Paula Morelenbaum, on a pair of albums celebrating the work of bossa nova pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim. They recorded their first album, Casa (2001), mostly in Jobim's home studio in Rio de Janeiro, with Sakamoto performing on the late Jobim's grand piano. The album was well received, having been included in the list of The New York Timess top albums of 2002. A live album, Live in Tokyo, and a second album, A Day in New York, soon followed. Sakamoto and the Morelenbaums would also collaborate on N.M.L. No More Landmine, an international effort to raise awareness for the removal of landmines. The trio would release the single "Zero Landmine", which also featured David Sylvian, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Cyndi Lauper, and Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, the other two founding members of Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Sakamoto collaborated with Alva Noto (an alias of Carsten Nicolai) to release Vrioon, an album of Sakamoto's piano clusters treated by Nicolai's unique style of digital manipulation, involving the creation of "micro-loops" and minimal percussion. The two produced this work by passing the pieces back and forth until both were satisfied with the result. This debut, released on German label Raster-Noton, was voted record of the year 2004 in the electronica category by British magazine The Wire. They then released Insen (2005)—while produced in a similar manner to Vrioon, this album is somewhat more restrained and minimalist. After further collaboration, they released two more albums: utp_ (2008) and Summvs (2011).
In 2005, Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia hired Sakamoto to compose ring and alert tones for their high-end phone, the Nokia 8800. In 2006, Nokia offered the ringtones for free on their website. Sakamoto Ringtones Offered to All https://www.wired.com/; Retrieved September 9, 2015. Around this time, a reunion with YMO cofounders Hosono and Takahashi caused a stir in the Japanese press. They released a single "Rescue" in 2007 and a DVD "HAS/YMO" in 2008. In July 2009, Sakamoto was honored as Officier of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres at the French embassy in Tokyo.
In 2013, Sakamoto was a jury member at the 70th Venice International Film Festival. The jury viewed 20 films and was chaired by filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci.
On April 14, 2013, he also participated in a performance of film and music by video pioneer Nam June Paik, selected by musicians and composers who knew him well: himself, Stephen Vitiello, and Steina Vasulka.
In 2014, Sakamoto became the first guest artistic director of the Sapporo International Art Festival 2014 (SIAF2014). On July 10, Sakamoto released a statement indicating that he had been diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer in late June of the same year. He announced a break from his work while he sought treatment and recovery. On August 3, 2015, Sakamoto posted on his website that he was "in great shape ... I am thinking about returning to work" and announced that he would be providing music for Yoji Yamada's Haha to Kuraseba ( Living with My Mother). In 2015, Sakamoto also composed the score for the Alejandro González Iñárritu's film, The Revenant, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.
In January 2017 it was announced that Sakamoto would release a solo album in April 2017 through Milan Records; the new album, titled async, was released on March 29, 2017, to critical acclaim. In February 2018, he was selected to be on the jury for the main competition section of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival.
On June 14, 2018, a documentary about the life and work of Sakamoto, entitled , was released. The film follows Sakamoto as he recovers from cancer and resumes creating music, protests nuclear power plants following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, and creates field recordings in a variety of locales. He also elucidates the influence of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky on the making of his then upcoming album async. Sakamoto says, "When I started making the album, the sound that was in my mind was the Bach theme from Solaris, arranged on synthesizers by Eduard Artemyev. I arranged the same piece in the beginning of the process for async, and it sounded really good. It was very different from Artemyev's version, so I was very happy. Then I arranged four more Bach chorales next to that, and they all sounded really good. So I thought, maybe this is the album? Then I thought I needed to do something more, to write my own chorale. I tried, and that became the song "solari", obviously, with no "s". Directed by Stephen Nomura Schible, the documentary was met with critical praise.
He later said, "As I've been making music and trying to go deeper and deeper, I was finally able to understand what the Tarkovsky movies are about – how symphonic they are – it's almost music. Not just the sounds – it's a symphony of moving images and sounds. They are more complex than music." He calls Tarkovsky and French director Robert Bresson his favorites, claiming their books – Notes on the Cinematographer and Sculpting in Time, respectively – as "his bible."
In 2022 he took part in the creation of Dumb Type's new installation 2022 as a new member of the Japanese collective, for the Japan Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale.
The same year Sakamoto collaborated with the young Ukrainian violinist Illia Bondarenko on the single "Piece for Illia" as part of the compilation fundraiser Ukraine (volume 2) for relief for victims of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
On April 24, 2023, the song "Snooze" was released by Agust D (Suga of BTS), which was dedicated to Sakamoto, who featured in the song as a keyboardist. Sakamoto also appears in the music trailers leading up to the Agust D album, D-Day.
In 2023, filmmaker Neo Sora–Sakamoto's son–directed a final performance of Sakomoto playing solo piano, released as . It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023.
Sakamoto's internationally successful composition "Behind the Mask" (1978)—a synthpop song in which he sang vocals through a vocoder—was later Cover song by a number of international artists, including Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton. "Behind the Mask" was one of the first songs to use a gated reverb effect on the snare drum, a technique that later became popular in 1980s pop music.
A version of Sakamoto's 1978 song "Thousand Knives" was released on Yellow Magic Orchestra's 1981 album BGM. This version was one of the earliest uses of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, for YMO's live performance of "1000 Knives" in 1980 and their BGM album release in 1981.
Sakamoto worked with artists such as Thomas Dolby; Aztec Camera, on the Dreamland (1993) album; and Imai Miki, co-producing her 1994 album A Place In The Sun. In 1996, Sakamoto produced "Mind Circus", the first single from actress Miki Nakatani, leading to a collaboration period spanning 9 singles and 7 albums though 2001.
Roddy Frame, who worked with Sakamoto as a member of Aztec Camera, explained in a 1993 interview preceding the release of Dreamland that he had had to wait a lengthy period of time before he was able to work with Sakamoto, who wrote two soundtracks, a solo album and music for the opening ceremony at the Barcelona Olympics, prior to working with Frame over four weeks in a New York studio. Frame said that he was impressed by the work of YMO and the Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence soundtrack, explaining: "That's where you realise that the atmosphere around his compositions is actually in the writing – it's got nothing to do with synthesisers." Frame's decision to ask Sakamoto was finalized after he saw his performance at the Japan Festival that was held in London, United Kingdom. Of his experience recording with Sakamoto, Frame said:
In 1994, Japan Football Association asked Ryuichi Sakamoto to compose the instrumental song "Japanese Soccer Anthem". The composition was played at the beginning of Japan Football Association-sponsored events.
Sakamoto also produced video game music. In 1989, he composed music for one of the first CD-ROM games, for the PC Engine. In 1998, he composed the startup sound for Sega's Dreamcast console. In the 2000s, he composed music for the Dreamcast game (2000) and the PlayStation 2 games Seven Samurai 20XX (2004) and Dawn of Mana (2006).
He was the subject of Elizabeth Lennard's 1985 documentary Tokyo Melody, which mixes studio footage and interviews with Sakamoto about his musical philosophy in a nonlinear format, against a backdrop of 1980s Tokyo. Sakamoto later composed Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), which earned him an Academy Award and Grammy Award with fellow composers David Byrne and Cong Su. In that same year, Sakamoto composed the score to the cult-classic anime film . He also composed the music for the original Japanese version of The Adventures of Chatran.
Other films scored by Sakamoto include Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993); Pedro Almodóvar's High Heels (1991); Oliver Stone's Wild Palms (1993); John Maybury's (1998); Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes (1998) and Femme Fatale (2002); Oshima's Gohatto (1999); Jun Ichikawa's (director of the Mitsui ReHouse commercial from 1997 to 1999 starring Chizuru Ikewaki and Mao Inoue) Tony Takitani (2005);, Hwang Dong-hyuk's, The Fortress (2017); and Andrew Levitas's Minamata (2020) starring Johnny Depp, Minami Hinase, and Bill Nighy.
Several tracks from Sakamoto's earlier solo albums have also appeared in film soundtracks. In particular, variations of "Chinsagu No Hana" (from Beauty) and "Bibo No Aozora" (from 1996) provide the poignant closing pieces for Sue Brooks's Japanese Story (2003) and Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (2006), respectively. In 2015, Sakamoto teamed up with Iñárritu to score his film, The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. The film Monster by director Hirokazu Kore-eda, released in 2023, was Sakamoto's final score; the film is dedicated to his memory.
According to Resident Advisor, Sakamoto's classical compositions were influential in helping to define modern classical music. Sakamoto's classical compositionsespecially "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" and "Bibi no Aozara"have been Cover version and sampled by numerous musicians.
Sakamoto also acted in several films: perhaps his most notable performance was as the conflicted Captain Yonoi in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, alongside Takeshi Kitano and British rock singer David Bowie. He also played roles in The Last Emperor (as Masahiko Amakasu) and Madonna's "Rain" music video.
On January 21, 2021, Sakamoto shared a letter on his website announcing that though his throat cancer had gone into remission, he had been diagnosed with rectal cancer, and was undergoing treatment after a successful surgery. He wrote, "From now on, I will be living alongside cancer. But, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer."
Sakamoto died from cancer on March 28, 2023, at the age of 71. His death was announced on April 2, after his funeral had taken place.
In 2015, Sakamoto also supported opposition to the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in the Ōmura Bay in Henoko, with a new and Okinawan version of his 2004 single "Undercooled" whose sales partially contributed to the "Henoko Fund", aimed to stop the relocation of the base on Okinawa Island.
Sakamoto was also an environmentalist. In one of his last public activities before his death, he sent a letter to Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike in early March 2023 calling for the suspension and review of the planned redevelopment of the Jingūmae neighborhood in Tokyo due to environmental concerns.
His score for The Sheltering Sky (1990) won him his second Golden Globe Award, and his score for Little Buddha (1993) received another Grammy Award nomination. In 1997, his collaboration with Toshio Iwai, Music Plays Images X Images Play Music, was awarded the Golden Nica, the grand prize of the Prix Ars Electronica competition. He also contributed to the Academy Award winning soundtrack for Babel (2006) with several pieces of music, including the closing theme "Bibo no Aozora". In 2009, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France's Ministry of Culture for his musical contributions. His score for The Revenant (2015) was nominated for the Golden Globe and BAFTA, and won Best Musical Score from the Dallas–Fort Worth Film Critics Association.
Sakamoto won the Golden Pine Award (Lifetime Achievement) at the 2013 International Samobor Film Music Festival, along with Clint Eastwood and Gerald Fried.
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