Ryuichi Sakamoto S/D

Thanks! Realizing now I have listened to (and love) Thousand Knives, but looking forward to sampling the rest!

that list is more or less my sweet spot too but i’d probably add works/CM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R731jAs0_NU

i’d be lying if i said i like the 2000s glitchy electronic RS or YMO stuff even 1/4 as much as my faves from either discographies but i also respect them following their interests and it can be pretty. disappearance with taylor deupree is prob the one i’ve played the most, though it’s been a few years.

also features a relatively early appearance from ichiko aoba:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIRO5k6bmKY

def also respect how he stayed plugged in and worked with lots of younger musicians basically his whole life

Also not to discount his playing and production for others especially with ex Akiko Yano. Gohan Ga Dekitayo (sp?), Ai Ga Nakucha Ne and Tadaima are all strange, exciting albums.
I also live for YMO up until Naughty Boys when it got too slick for a while ( for me ).

yeah I love the CM stuff! illustrated musical encyclopdia is so fng good too

the slickness is the point I think, the whole album sounds like 40 minutes of commercial jingles, but you can actually enjoy them because they're not trying to sell you anything (besides more YMO albums I guess)

tbh I'm not too sold on glitchy Sakamoto either but that stuff seems to have cultivated an entirely different audience so I assume it's very good for what it is. I would say the same about a lot of Brian Eno albums. async, his latest "proper" record, is very nice. I also really dig Chasm, which strikes me as one his few true "solo" records, in that it brings in a lot of guests and doesn't really have a concept behind it. the hip-hop track on it is fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1lqJPNKTTw

Oh yeah how could I have left IME out of that list? For shame.

Just leaving this slice of madness here -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HIbDVNG7E8

aha yes. The bside of that single is really cool, iirc, not rock, more of a YMO sound

Did we post these?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9intgzzLfk

Eric H I’m very partial to - in no particular order -

B-2 Unit
1000 Knives
Esperanto
Neo Geo
async
Left Handed Dream
GEM Collection

missing one or two ottomh but I think these are pretty wonderful non-sndtrk albums.

Often think about Ryuichi Sakamoto hating the music in his favorite restaurant so much he pro bono made them a replacement playlist — inspirational. https://t.co/y3aN62y692 pic.twitter.com/xCRsCb1Z8y

— Nick Newman (@Nick_Newman) April 2, 2023

ha I love that story too

apparently this is the playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2YY3rAwm9tldNhlBmuMqgY?si=tBcsQ5q_SsWhBPp_cHIu2w&dd=1&nd=1

Had a rabbit hole moment last night and made a mix of some of RS' production work from the late 70s to the early 90s.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/3cgychgpp8o9eaei95w80/h?dl=0&rlkey=4swircqlijwji9limzl1zgdkf

Miki Imai - Watermark
Akiko Yano - Canton Boy
Kanako Wada - Creation My Heart
Tokiko Kato - Alabama Song
Robin Scott - Once In A Lifetime
(Phew) - 終曲（フィナーレ）
Akina Nakamori - Everlasting Love
Mari Iijima - My Best Friend
Friction - I Can Tell
Raijie - Tabidachi
Hayaku Aitsuni - South Of The Border
Seri Ishikawa - いろ、なつ、ゆめ～彩・夏・夢
Virginia Astley - Tree-Top Club
Hiromi Go - Your Name Is Psycho
Jill Jones - You Do Me (7'' Mix)
Thomas Dolby - Field Work
Koharu Kisaragi - Neo-Plant

Virginia Astley’s Hope in a Darkened Heart is an incredible record

I love his score for the 1993 limited series WILD PALMS. Such a sinister, claustrophobic work

xp seems to just be a .rtf file?

Sry Sleeve, files are still uploading, check back in 2 mins.

lol np, thanks

Errata already, the (fantastic) Koharu Kisaragi track is Träumerei, not Neo-Plant

Thanks for the download!

aww at that restaurant playlist, I would have loved to make him a semi-ambient/ambient mix cd

_BIG_ fan of this particular miki nakatani album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ahRf9NggM

RS appears to have done a lot of stuff for it

Producer, Composed By, Arranged By, Performer [Performed By], Mixed By – Ryuichi Sakamoto

https://www.discogs.com/release/2456654-%E4%B8%AD%E8%B0%B7%E7%BE%8E%E7%B4%80-%E7%A7%81%E7%94%9F%E6%B4%BB

his daughter also covered the opener, tho I prefer the other ver

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUrxDFXWWJc

I did my best to recreate the Kajitsu Playlist for Tidal, missing two tracks that Spotify had.
https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/02b62cb5-3c23-4320-9791-a15c726a1216

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUw6nUkjFcM

RIP Luigi :(

Fucking Jacobin... this is a tweet leading to an article I will not be reading:

The brilliant cornucopia of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work crystallizes the freedoms and desires that neoliberalism has betrayed.

to be fair, Sakamoto was a Marxist when he was in uni!

surprised I haven't seen too much discussion of his collaborations with Fennesz - Cendre gets a lot of love but I also adore Flumina from 2011. very conceptually rigid but always strange and beautiful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwELGACE-GY

That Fennesz + Sakamoto set (2 CDs) is the only thing of his I own in physical form.

wow wonder how his score for Snake Eyes sounds

https://www.discogs.com/master/288313-Ryuichi-Sakamoto-Snake-Eyes-Music-From-The-Motion-Picture

Oh damn, would listen
This is not the g I joe thing is it?

revisiting async now, didn't know at the time that he approached it thinking it would be his last album

it is a lot heavier and ominous than I remembered. I guess the weight of his death is all over this thing. it's the soundtrack to a world falling apart, much as his own body was. also I think it might be one of his very best solo albums, as difficult a listen as it may be.

it really is

been filling in the gaps of my knowledge of sakamoto's discog over the past two days and it's been an incredibly rich musical experience. guy was always making at least fifteen different kinds of music and he rocked at all of them. i was unaware of and am now totally in love with his ambient pop house album from 1992, heartbeat

highly recommend his bonkers 1985 film adelic penguins, which uses music from esperanto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-nJPWJE0cs

BTTB for me today, which I had never heard before, and Hidariude No Yume, which I had bleeped over in the past and is also excellent.

feels corny to say it but I think both Ongaku Zukan & Esperanto are precursors to vaporwave. the former is the kind of stuff they love to sample and the latter sounds to be like what OPN does at his more interesting and creative. but they're both so very different to each other, listening side by side you'd never know they were by the same artist, much less released in consecutive years. that's what makes his career so fascinating to me - Hosono has a very diverse career as well but everything he does has sort of an aural watermark, even with his productions you can tell it's him. Sakamoto was, as Brad mentions, just pretty good at everything

Ongaku Zukan & Esperanto are precursors to vaporwave

i'm listening to futurista rn and i think it should be included in this list

god this record is absolutely incredible wtf

haven't heard that one in a while but you're probably right

Because of recent searches, YT is throwing RS suggestions at me and I came across this installation piece called 'Plankton', a lovely close-up, detailed sound design/ambient thing.

Futurista is great and a track from it was featured in the fabulous Optimo mixtape "Polyphonic Cosmos"

I admit that I've never been a deep head when it comes to Sakamoto/YMO, prior to async I had only heard random tracks here and there, but I've been listening to 'Playing the Piano' a ton.

heartbeat is so good!

i knew sakamoto primarily as a pianist and composer for a long time before diving into his y.m.o. and early solo work. have never heard anything of his from the 90s tho, enjoying the dive.

he really was a special piano player, incredibly dynamic with unique voicings that find a midpoint between evans and cage

What a talent, to be able to play like that and not have to do it, the experimentation and the pop stuff from so early on, jeez.

Extract from a 'Sound on Sound' interview from 1998, I'd love to know where this place was/is.

"This time I'm interviewing Sakamoto in one of the most unusual hotels I've ever set foot in. He seems to have a taste for the out-of-the-ordinary, whether in music or in hotels, but this takes some beating. It's located in West London, and is so private that there's no signposting outside it. Inside, it's composed of rectangular shapes painted white, with interior design in an ultra-sparse, minimalistic style somewhere between Zen and '60s chic. The corridors are laced with identical white panels as far as the eye can see, the only thing indicating that these panels are actually doors being a small button on each, with a tiny red light and a keyhole."

This is a p arresting version of one of his best known singles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efpU91sflaI

yes, that one is incredible. sounds like a video game soundtrack version of ligeti's music ricercata, or something

lovely video by Dolby upthread.
had never heard of RS until Dolby worked with him, so was really nice to find out the backstory to 'fieldwork' which is still one of my fave dolby singles.

the bit in that video that I liked was him saying you could play something for him and he could play it back perfectly by ear. I've actually heard that a few times about him, which I think is a skill very few musicians possess.