Ryuichi Sakamoto S/D

_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.

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.

― MaresNest, Wednesday, April 5, 2023 12:51 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I thought you may have been referring to the Sketch Show tune called "Plankton", which RS actually isn't on...before finding out he actually did do an hourlong piece for an installation. this guy just has so much out there. his Discogs page has nearly 300 entries on it. I like that quote from The Sheltering Sky that's on async, about how life seems limitless because we don't know when we will die...indeed, Sakamoto's catalogue seems limitless, there's always so much more to hear. How many people out there actually know every single one of his solo albums and soundtracks?

budman!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl5fBJ2j3x0

I kinda love how the concept of 'selling out' just doesn't seem to exist in the music community in Japan.

There are acres and acres of commercials with YMO together and separately, selling all sorts of things, I wonder if it started in the bubble or if it's always been so.

XXP - it is rather lovely too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEt2YzR0zEk

bizarre to see him actually drinking beer in the commercial. in America you can't do that...you can open the bottles and clink the glasses but you can't actually drink out of them

I realise I'm doing the exact same thing as when Yukihiro passed, diving into the back catalogue, watching documentaries and YT clips, I'm feeling sad as hell, but (as frogbs points out) how fucking glorious is it to have this seemingly endless ocean of music to dive into?

speaking of YMO commercials I came across this recently, not sure what the point of this commercial was except to make people question their sexuality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m4ZCWqn13o

hot

going down the rabbit hole of wacky 80s/90s peak economic bubble ads that sakamoto seemingly did a thousand of. it's such a joy to watch the man, he has such a natural charisma and warmth!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IRt3Kpinb0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEnMp8Y8_FY

(tried listening to async, my favourite album ever, today - I can't. there's dark and strange magic coursing through those songs and it's going to take a while to be able to approach them after his passing.)

wow adelic penguins is so good

Every time I see this thread bumped I fear I'm going to read that he's died.

― Naive Teen Idol, Friday, April 3, 2015 12:32 AM (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

say it ain't so Sakamoto

全くありません。人生でプログレが好きになったことも影響を受けたこともありません。

Not at all. I’ve never in my life liked prog rock and I’ve never been influenced by it either.#skmtnews #ryuichisakamoto #坂本龍一 #twelve

— ryuichi sakamoto (@ryuichisakamoto) March 22, 2023

― frogbs, Wednesday, March 22, 2023 1:57 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not entirely Ryuichi-related, but in addition to having that fear yet again this week, one of the odder things about the world we live in is that celebrities are tweeting literally up to the day before they die and then, boom, they're gone. Roger Ebert was reviewing movies before he announced he was in the final stages (10 years ago this week, actually), David Crosby was grading the joints his Twitter followers rolled literally the day before he died -- and here you have Sakamoto, presumably on his death bed, telling some schmo that, no, he's never been into prog at all and WTF is that question, dude.

It's a strange sensation as a fan.

I think it's nice? May we all squeeze every last drop out of life.

agree with this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsH_UBptm-U

timeless

The amazing thing about that piano version of Riot in Lagos is that it makes the groove more prominent, and in turn, the overall Afrobeat/Fela feel of the piece. I love it – it was the only version available in Spotify for a long time, and got so used to it.

I think it's nice? May we all squeeze every last drop out of life.

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, April 6, 2023 11:25 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh I agree -- I mean, that's exactly what the folks I cited did. It's just sudden is all. I mean, as I posted, I was dreading Sakamoto's passing for 8 years. But I think when you see people doing interviews and shooting the bull with fans it can be surprising to then learn they've passed.

The amazing thing about that piano version of Riot in Lagos is that it makes the groove more prominent, and in turn, the overall Afrobeat/Fela feel of the piece.

Yes! BTW, I'm assuming on at least this cut there are multiple Sakamotos "playing the piano" (ie, overdubs) as there are things happening that require four hands.

well my Youtube recs are like 50% Sakamoto now, which rules. check this shit out, how awesome is this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a8xV9xOHqA

after listening to all of his '80s and '90s "pop" albums in a row i came out with smoochy as my favorite. it reminds me of the chill-out-ier corners of something like beaucoup fish

Since people are rediscovering his early 90s stuff I'm gonna say don't sleep on Technodon. I think its an album that works much better in the context of their other 90s releases instead of what YMO had done a decade ago. It's actually really good. In retrospect its super cool that such a high profile reunion happened and they decided to take it in a direction that conceptually was unlike anything they did in their original incarnation. Feel like it would be regarded a lot differently if it didn't have the YMO name (which technically, it didn't!)

If nothing else the track "Nostalgia" is a excellent, haunting Sakamoto piece - if you took it out of context and put it on a RS mixtape I don't think anyone would guess what it was actually from. Initially I thought it was funny that a YMO reunion would have a track called "Nostalgia" that sounded nothing at all like YMO, but I guess it is kinda similar to those Prologue/Epilogue pieces on Technodelic. Actually I think most tracks here would be neat highlights on mixtapes. But people don't like the album.

The latest ep of Gilles Peterson's radio show predictably has a Sakamoto tribute and the first two tracks they play are an orchestral "Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence" followed by "You're Friend To Me" and that's a great illustration of the "wait, this is the SAME GUY?" aspect discussed itt.

oh wow turns out i love technodon, thank you frogbs, nobody ever has anything good to say about this record yet it rules