Nine Essential Ryuichi Sakamoto Collaborations to Know

Ryuichi Sakamoto has spent more than four decades writing music for symphonies and player pianos, for temple blocks and laptops, articulating from his home bases in Tokyo and New York his vision for music that transcends but doesn’t ignore culture and geography. While perhaps best known for a few simple melodies played on solo piano, his body of work spans a vast universe of electro-pop, jazz, bossa nova, electronica, and ambient sound sculptures, collected on at least 16 solo albums and many more living recordings, film and stage scores, and compilations.

Alternating between “solo” projects, made alone or with all-star casts, and joint affairs with one or two other artists, Sakamoto’s work has come to represent a globalism that is politically engaged and omnivorous yet tasteful. He clearly plays well with others, and is invested in that play. His work seems most intensely personal when it involves personnel beyond himself.

As part of the visionary Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto co-built structures hip-hop and pop music would inhabit for decades, including hits like “Firecracker” (which the band gloriously performed on Soul Train in 1980). As the composer for films including The Last Emperor, Love Is the Devil, and The Revenant, he punctured Hollywood’s bombast and offered warm simplicity and a cool range of instruments sourced from around the world; most recently, he harvested some bright interludes for Call Me By Your Name. He’s dueted with a player piano that churns out reconfigured versions of past hits; with another human player in a Glenn Gould madcap style; and with a laptop whiz who glitches them into some kind of twitchy bliss.

Last year, Sakamoto released Async, his first solo album in eight years, made as he recovered from throat cancer. Stark, challenging, and thrilling, Async stared down mortality with clear eyes and curiosity while more or less rejecting harmony and traditional patterning. Since then, Sakamoto’s readied two more albums: Async Remodels, a collection of remixes by leading electronic figures including Fennesz, Andy Stott, and Oneohtrix Point Never, and Glass, a live recording of improvisation with Alva Noto at the Glass House in Connecticut.

“I hope to record the perfect album, my masterpiece before I die,” Sakamoto told The South China Morning Post in 2016. “That is my dearest wish, and I am working on it.” Here, a look at the best moments in a life’s work of collaborations.

Ryuichi Sakamoto & Toshiyuki Tsuchitori: “Musique Differencielle 1” (1976)

Sakamoto was born in 1952 and began playing piano as a child; he soon became fascinated by Claude Debussy, whom Sakamoto calls “the door to all 20th century music.” In 1970, he began studying composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo National University, but temporarily abandoned the strictures of classical music for the mysterious possibilities of analog synthesizers, free jazz, and improvisation. His first album, 1976’s Disappointment-Hateruma, follows Sakamoto and percussionist Toshiyuki Tsuchitori as they explore the possibilities of wood blocks, gongs, marimba, and other drums, with a few clarifying touches of a grand piano. “Creating music that doesn’t synchronize is like speaking in a language that doesn’t exist,” Sakamoto said in a 2017 documentary. In other words, he’s been making it up from scratch from the beginning.

Yellow Magic Orchestra: “Behind the Mask” (1979)

By his mid-20s, Sakamoto was already a sought-after session musician in Tokyo when he took up with Haruomi Hosono, previously of the psyche-folk band Happy End and the country-tropical collective Tin Pan Alley, and the glam rocker Yukihiro Takahashi. The trio formed the Yellow Magic Orchestra with the idea, Hosono said, “to take these western ideas of the exotic and subvert them.” It worked like gangbusters: YMO began international superstars, fusing Asian kitsch and innovative electronics. They were a more ironic Kraftwerk, perhaps, yet the politics rarely traveled well. “Behind the Mask” was a huge hit, with lyrics by the British poet Chris Mosdell, but its critique of alienation turned sour when it was covered in 1987 by celebrities including Eric Clapton and Phil Collins, who both had histories of anti-immigrant bigotry, or by Michael Jackson, who in 1982 turned it into a middling love song that went unreleased for almost 30 years. Meanwhile, Sakamoto performed the song in various configurations over the decades, including a beautiful 2013 rendition with an amateur youth orchestra of survivors of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Ryuichi Sakamoto & David Sylvian: “Forbidden Colors” (1983)

Four years later, YMO had released six mostly-excellent albums and broken up. Sakamoto followed up his 1978 solo debut, the exotica-industrial Thousand Knives, with the astonishing B-2 Unit in 1980; its innovative rhythms and polyphonic buzz came courtesy of the Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, one of the first programmable synths. Another album, the wonderfully glossy Left-Handed Dream, swings like an expensive stereo system designed to play Roxy Music. What was left but to star in a homoerotic period film with David Bowie?

In Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Sakamoto looks amazing as a Japanese officer in a Japanese prison camp circa 1942, and Bowie is amazing as a British officer. Sakamoto’s had a long, successful career as a model, if not an actor, but the lasting legacy of the film is his heart-on-his-sleeve score. The title track is the sound of a stiff upper lip trembling; every piano should play it at least once. Longtime vocal guest star David Sylvian turns it into a new wave weeper, with a nervy vocal that peacocks as it revels in sorrow. An instant classic, 35 years later it would soundtrack Olympic ice dancing.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kit Fitzgerald, Paul Garrin: “Adelic Penguins” (1986)

As the Cold War loomed and digital technology boomed, Sakamoto’s vision swelled. His 1986 album Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia catalogued experiments in funk and smooth pop; that year’s Esperanto mixed percussion by the Japanese composer Yas-Kaz with guitar courtesy of downtown New York hero Arto Lindsay. Esperanto provided a soundtrack for this collaboration with video artists Kit Fitzgerald and Paul Garrin, an eye-popping and strident spectacular performed live upon a 14-story Jumbotron at the 1986 Expo in Tsukuba, Japan. Sakamoto’s 1980s video work is hugely underrated; his formal experiments rival Peter Gabriel or early Cabaret Voltaire, with investigations of cultural and national identity as powerful as the gender critiques offered by Kate Bush and Eurythmics.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: “We Love You” (1989)

In his 1995 book Ocean of Sound, Sakamoto tells author David Toop, “One of my friends, he’s a philosopher and critic. He made a word: ‘outernationalism.’ Internationalism is still based on nationality. Being outernational is like Moses in the desert. There’s no country. There is just trade, communication and merchants, but there’s no nationality. It’s a utopia and I like it.” For his 1989 album Beauty, Sakamoto united an atlas of references and a phone book of friends. The guest list for “We Love You” is impressive: Willie Colón’s longtime percussionist Milton Cardona, the Congolese guitar savant Dali Kimoko-N’Dala, Soft Machine icon Robert Wyatt, and even Brian Wilson—all covering the Rolling Stones. What could have been an overcooked mess instead plays like a lost Madchester classic. “I want to be a citizen of the world,” Sakamoto said. “It sounds very hippie but I like that.”

Ryuichi Sakamoto: “Love and Hate (Marshall Jefferson Mix)” (1994)

Sakamoto’s early-1990s work sometimes mistook subtlety for mush, but the decade’s vogue of endless remixes served him well, particularly those by house music specialist Satoshi Tomiie. Here, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson preaches against homophobia and other forms of violence with the fervor of an earnest Green Velvet, advocating a love that’s as fierce as it is tough. Meanwhile, Chicago house progenitor Marshall Jefferson testifies on the power of drum programming—his remix amps up the tribal house drama to devastating effect. Play it loud enough and you can hear the dancing queens assembling; any louder and you’ll join in.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: “Salvation” (1997)

As the millennium approached, Sakamoto looked back on his career with 1996, reconfiguring works from his soundtracks for The Sheltering Sky, The Last Emperor, and other projects for a piano trio. He also looked ahead with the new symphonic work Untitled 01. Its four sections terminate with “Salvation,” a wrenching investigation into the meaning of redemption. Laurie Anderson and David Sylvian open the piece with their own ruminations; an extended passage of bittersweet strings follows. “I was very frustrated with watching the news of starvation in Africa in ’95,” he told CMJ when the recording of the work was released in the U.S. as 1998’s Discord. “I felt there was a new crisis not to be able to save each other. So I asked myself what salvation was to me. Naturally, I didn’t find the answer.” The piece ends with a shattering climax of crashing metal, chord progressions moving but not harmonizing around each other, and agonizing, unnerving moments of silence.

Willits + Sakamoto: “Sea Plains” (2008)

In the 2000s, Sakamoto began a series of multi-release duets with electroacoustic and experimental composers including Fennesz, Alva Noto, Christopher Willits, and Taylor Deupree—the latter of whom’s 12k label released Ocean Fire, ”dedicated to the healing and restoration of our fragile oceans.“ Dark and dank, the seven tracks submerge Sakamoto’s piano within tides of processed guitar and spatters of foam. “Sea Plains” is a true wonder, a bridge between Arthur Russell’s wide-eyed-in-the-womb World of Echo and the undertow of unease explored by sound sculptors like Richard Chartier.

Unaigumi + Ryuichi Sakamoto: “Miruku Yugafu-Undercooled” (2015)

2006 saw the birth of his own label, Commmons (the extra ‘m’ stands for “music”), which went on to release music by Boredoms, OOIOO, and Unaigumi, fronted by longtime collaborator Misako Koja. In 2014, Koja suggested reworking a track from his 2004 album Chasm as a charity single, with vocals from a quartet of female folk musicians from Okinawa. Completed as Sakamoto recovered from cancer, the song layers piano, the three-stringed sanshin, and soothing washes of electronics beneath the women’s clear voices, all unified into a hypnotic chant designed to be heard around the world, a desire to “make a wish for the utopia.”