The irony and costumes, he admits, were a shield against attention, and he would be far happier one step removed from the limelight. “I was … grateful.”īut Sakamoto didn’t like stardom. Sakamoto still shakes his head as he recalls Afrika Bambaataa telling him: “Kraftwerk and YMO made hip-hop.” Uncharacteristically, he falters, searching for the right word. The members’ solo tracks also gained a large black audience they appeared on Soul Train and inspired early hip-hop, electro and techno. That humour and ambition would drive YMO’s techno-pop to huge worldwide sales, particularly in the US where they mischievously played on tropes of the “mysterious east” and early Reagan-era fears of a Japanese economic takeover, while dressed in Mao-style boiler suits or garish, cyborg-like new wave fashions. Photograph: Allstar/Universal/Sportsphoto Ltd Sakamoto and David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. His dream was creating independent music and exporting it to the world from Japan. We were shown a drawing by Hosono himself – it was of Mount Fuji erupting, and it said ‘FIVE MILLION SALES’. Soon after this session, I was called to his house in Tokyo. “We found out later that this was a kind of audition for forming Yellow Magic Orchestra. “It was considered a privilege to be called to join Hosono’s sessions,” Sakamoto says. “I was quite busy!” From this tour came industry contacts, a thriving career as a session player, and the chance to mingle with musicians such as Yukihiro Takahashi and Haruomi Hosono, who in 1978 formed the electropop band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). “I was working with the computer at university and playing jazz in the daytime, buying west coast psychedelic and early Kraftwerk records in the afternoon, and playing folk at night,” he says.
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He played with free jazz bands, then in 1972 met the folk-rock singer Masato Tomobe “in a tiny, tiny bar in Shinjuku ” who took him on tour as his keyboard player. Asian music influenced Debussy who influenced me – it’s all a huge circle.”īy the time he got to university to study music composition (“Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Xenakis”), Sakamoto was in demand. Music about a mood and atmosphere, and not east or west.
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I had the pop music on one side and Bach and Haydn on the other, but then, when I was 13, Debussy came into my ear. “I didn’t know if they were British or American, just western,” he says. He remembers American GIs as an intriguing presence on the streets of Tokyo, and at 11 he fell hard for the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Photograph: Ebet Roberts/RedfernsĪ nebulous idea of western culture also fascinated him. Very cultural!” He went to “one of the most liberal, conceptual” infant schools in Japan, which Yoko Ono had also attended, and was exposed to art and classical music there, painting and taking piano lessons from the age of six. “So all the time all these very young wannabe writers and novelists came to the house and there was a lot of drinking until the morning, and lots of books in the house, which we had to avoid so the piles didn’t collapse on us. His father was an editor for the novelists Kenzaburō Ōe and Yukio Mishima.
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“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.
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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. 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.