Artist Ryuichi Sakamoto
MerryChristmasMr.Lawrence(Live)
Ryuichi Sakamoto - MediaBahnLive
At some point, the name "Ryuichi Sakamoto" didn't belong to him.
In new York in the era of the new crown pop, he was trapped in the studio and could only connect via video. Ryuichi Sakamoto set up a New York skyline as his digital background. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said he could have set up a traditional tatami room as a backdrop, but he has been considered a pioneer of synth pop, electronic music, atmospheric house dance music and cyberpunk music for nearly 50 years, and that background is not suitable for "Ryuichi Sakamoto".
Ryuichi Sakamoto's portrait used in an interview with the Financial Times? James Ferguson, Image credit: FT
In nearly half a century of musical, commercial and artistic practice, he always seems to be understood one-sidedly. In 1999, Sony Classic, who represented Sakamoto's record business, had its publicist say on a U.S. Billboard show: "We need him [Ryuichi Sakamoto] to meet the needs of high-end music consumers." Ryuichi Sakamoto was always asked to play famous songs on various occasions, even if it was just a work he had rushed to produce under a high-pressure film production schedule, so that he almost never responded to similar enthusiasm; and when asked if there was any remembrance of the "Yellow Magic Orchestra" and Japan's economic miracle, he replied each time: "Not much, only a little." ”
To you, chest kyun.
YellowMagicOrchestra - Cheating We
YMO members Ryuichi Sakamoto, Yukihiro Takahashi, haruhito Hosono (from left)
20 CDs released by the Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) from 1978 to 2011
Instead, in interviews over the past two years, he has emphasized himself more as an "artist"—without more embellishment in words, not a media-qualified "music/sound artist" or a "Japanese artist" within the framework of nationality.
In March 2020, Ryuichi Sakamoto, a muki art community at Longfu Temple, met a Chinese audience as an artist in the exhibition "Kannon Listening". The exhibition is also Ryuichi Sakamoto's first solo exhibition at an art museum in China, focusing on eight important large-scale sound installations, allowing Chinese audiences to visit the scene and explore different ways of understanding the world with the help of sound and technology.
The exhibition site of "Guanyin Listening"
"Kannon Listening" exhibition scene, "Your Time" (2017), Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takaya
The environment of the "Kannon Listening" exhibition hall is mostly dark, with LED panels, electronic components and digital devices flashing strange lights to create a quiet atmosphere, and the dark playback equipment surrounds Ryuichi Sakamoto's sound practice and directs the audience to a "walk into music" experience. As its title describes, this is an exhibition that requires the viewer to show a gesture of close listening in order to be able to appreciate it. Listening closely is a habit that Ryuichi Sakamoto has maintained for nearly 70 years, which continues to guide his musical explorations, leading him in new directions almost every decade.
Ryuichi Sakamoto compares his hand to the waterline on the piano in the documentary "The Final Chapter"
During the last decade, Ryuichi Sakamoto experienced the same fears when he visited Tokyo as he had when he experienced 9/11. Earthquakes and tsunamis hit Japan's east coast, killing nearly 20,000 people and triggering the Fukushima nuclear accident. It was the aftermath of the Fukushima accident that prompted him to engage in anti-nuclear activities — making a beloved avant-garde lyric poet a staunch critic of the government and its industrial roots.
Piano details at the exhibition site of "Guanyin Listening"
In "Your Time" (2017), completed in collaboration with Shiro Takatani, a piano that was washed ashore after the 2011 East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami was placed in the exhibition hall. For Ryuichi Sakamoto, this is a "survivor" of the Great East Japan Earthquake, whose timbre has become imperfect, and who has been "a piano that has been debugged by nature". It is no longer an instrument that needs to be played by people's hands, but returns to a simple object, and "reincarnation" becomes the carrier for people to perceive the sound of the earth.
In a previous interview with the American version of GQ, he said: "Since I have seen and thought about this piano, whenever I look at any other piano, I feel pain because they are an abuse of nature." ”
Ryuichi Sakamoto's oral autobiography "Music is Freedom"
As a symbol of modern music, the piano has been running through the growth process of Ryuichi Sakamoto. In the autobiography of "Music is Freedom", Sakamoto revealed his growth experience and mental journey. His father was the editor of Kawaide's study, and his mother was a hat designer who admired avant-garde freedom. Instead of choosing a public kindergarten for Sakamoto, his parents sent him to a kindergarten with piano characteristics.
In the years that followed, Ryuichi Sakamoto experienced immersion in Bach and Debussy, before gradually moving away from and obsessing over avant-garde musicians such as John Cage. When he was in high school in Tokyo, Ryuichi Sakamoto had to take a commuter train to class. Passengers were always crowded together, their limbs twisted. As a teenager, Ryuichi Sakamoto could only move, listening only to the noise around him and the sound of the wind, railroad tracks, and people rubbing against the wind as the tram drove through the city. Through these sounds, he was breathed away from the study of classical music at that time.
"Today, I feel like I've come a long way back to the desire for innovation I had when I was younger." He recalls: "I realized that to remain relevant, contemporary music had to be transformed. What we are doing now will not work. Since I was 18 or 19, I have always wanted to question the sounds, tones and scales associated with the piano, because this is the symbol of modern Western music. ”
Ryuichi Sakamoto's 2017 album Async
In the spring of 2017, Ryuichi Sakamoto released his first solo album in eight years, "Async", in which Ryuichi Sakamoto moved away from the form, playing with drum sticks, sticks tapping on glass panels, and sound sculptures, hoping that through this album, people would not only be able to listen to an album, but also experience sound. Ryuichi Sakamoto refers to it as "installation music". "Async" has a central place in this exhibition, such as in the "Your Time" exhibition hall, surrounded by a rearranged "Async" song.
Exhibition scene, "Asynchronous - Spatial Pulsation" (2017), Ryuichi Sakamoto + 3k Kashirashi
According to Lei Wanying, the founder of the Mumu Art Community, under normal circumstances, for the creation of installation works, Sakamoto Ryuichi first gives birth to ideas, and then cooperates with specific people or teams to achieve them. In his long-term collaborations with visual artists, Ryuichi Sakamoto has also continued to explore the relationship between space and sound. In addition to his outstanding achievements in the field of film scores, in "All-Star Video", Paik Nam-joon further enriched his digital works with video art. In 1999, Ryuichi Sakamoto premiered his multimedia opera Life, and Shiro Takatani was appointed visual director.
Exhibition scene, "Life - Flow, Invisible, Unheard... (2007/2021), Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani
The exhibition presents a number of audiovisual installations in collaboration with Takatani Shiko. In Life - Flow, Invisible, Unheard... (2007/2021), the two artists continued their collaboration on the opera Life, creating twelve water tanks, suspended in mid-air like clouds: each presented as a mixture of sound, artificial smoke and video footage. The images in the opera "Life" are projected on the floor of the exhibition hall according to a specific classification system, giving the audience the experience of walking through a Japanese garden.
Exhibition scene, "Asynchronous - Addicted" (2017), Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani
Taking the "Async" album as the medium or starting point, Ryuichi Sakamoto's collaboration with artists such as 3k Bailan and Apichatpong Welashagu has been further explored and explained in "Async - The First Light" (2017), "Async - Addiction" (2017) and "Async - Spatial Pulsation" (2017). In the dark space, twenty-four iPhones and iPads are like small windows emitting shimmering light, and the audience must get close to each device or peep to hear the subtle sounds coming from it. The on-screen images depict Ryuichi Sakamoto's studio, living room, and courtyard in New York, and the intimate audiovisual feels the presence of the artist by capturing the scenery and activities around him.
In creating Asynchronous – The First Light, director Apichatpong handed over his small camera, called the Digital Hedgehog, to his friends and relatives, inviting them to shoot freely. With low pixels, rough picture quality, and unique warm tones, each photo captures the intimate moments of everyday life: the sea, the country lanes outside the car window, sleeping children, adults and dogs. Weeras Hagu said that Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is extremely novel, as if it were the first time it came into contact with the sound of nature. "It's like the first light, the first picture, that comes into view in the morning, engraved in memory."
Exhibition scene, "Life-Well" Installation (Beijing Edition) (2013/2021), Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani
On the top floor of the Kiki Art Community, Ryuichi Sakamoto's "Life-Well" installation creates fog, which chases the sunlight with a mirror and then reflects it into the fog, while a sensor flexibly captures the flow of the fog and converts it into sound. Under the Beijing skyline, in the near distance are the roofs of old-fashioned bungalows, and in the distance are the gleaming CBD buildings.
This absorption and feedback of natural energy is also reflected in other works. The "Tsunami Piano" is automatically played based on global seismic data, and the drop of water droplets in "Pattern of Water 1" is also related to the data of precipitation in Asia. Since showing disappointment in the human world, Ryuichi Sakamoto has frequently searched for hope in nature. He went to the North Pole, put the microphone in the sea of ice to record the sound of snow melting, put the iron bucket on his head to feel the raindrops on rainy days, and at the same time he would transform the sounds received near Longfu Temple, including in the old alley, through the system he set up.
Exhibition scene, "The Pattern of Water 1" (2013), Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani
When asked about the statements, Sakamoto stressed that they should not be seen as evidence of himself as an ideal naturalist, but rather as his current general view of music. "Still, when I still want to make sounds, or make music in some way, I can't get rid of the melody, the harmony, the structure of the composition. It's paradoxical, but I have to survive that way. His conflict seemed to outweigh the answers. In the mouth of the staff of the Kiki Museum of Art who has been in contact with him, Ryuichi Sakamoto's personality charm is not "nice" in the conventional sense, but a kind of "appreciation", that is, the understanding and acceptance of everything.
In 2019, Ryuichi Sakamoto made a private visit to Beijing at the invitation of curator Zhang Youwei, which caused a lot of shock. After that, he began to have frequent relationships with China's Internet world. When the new crown epidemic broke out, he improvised, and on the cymbal cymbal film of the instrument he participated in playing, the camera crossed the words "Made in Wuhan, China", which made people shudder. In 2020, the news of his bowel cancer was once again on China's Weibo hot search, and under the concern of thousands of people, he was optimistic that he would "coexist with cancer", but it was precisely for this reason that he could not come to the exhibition site in China.
Ryuichi Sakamoto doesn't mind being an idol who breaks through the circle. His ability to make both hip-hop music and Olympic opening ceremony music has long been known, and in recent years, personal films, documentaries and social media have strengthened this contemporary personal myth by looking at his trivia, humanistic qualities and daily pursuits.
After the accidental casualty during the installation of the Mumu Art Museum, he was the first to issue a condolence and statement. In these special moments, his attitude towards his own situation and accidents in the outside world is consistent, empathetic to others, and let go of himself.
His several letters to China and an exhibition that he was unable to visit due to illness are just fragments of Ryuichi Sakamoto's "interaction" with China that we can understand, but we can still feel his spirit of solemnity for life. As he once said, "Life is a spectacle in which I dedicate myself." (Written by Gerald)
(Article from TANC)