Music Sounds the Way It Does Because of Ryuichi Sakamoto

The story goes that Ryuichi Sakamoto loved this one Japanese restaurant in Murray Hill but hated the music they played. So he did what any generous, generationally talented composer would do: he offered to make the chef a playlist. Since then, that anecdote has become a bit of a myth (ie. it went slightly viral). But this wasn’t, as reported, a fussy curmudgeon with an aversion to Spotify; this was an artist considering a room, and imagining how music might more thoughtfully fill it.

When I met Sakamoto in 2018, he told me that, in his old age, he only listened to ambient music. He said this like it was the natural evolution of things, that inevitably one gives up the obligation of melody and harmony for the ambiguity of texture and tone. One might assume “ambient” is synonymous with “background noise” or “lo-fi chill beats.” But the modern forms of it, which Sakamoto was fascinated by, confronts a vital question: what is the relationship between sound and the environment?

Ryuichi Sakamoto died at age 71 this past week. He was not just a composer, but a celebrated pianist, political activist, and at one point, an extraordinarily famous pop star. And though he may never have been a household name here in the States, there are very few forms of modern music that don’t reflect the influence of Sakamoto’s expansive, ever-changing four-decade career.

I found myself deeply saddened by his passing. For those who recognized him, he was a fixture of New York City. I used to see him around the West Village and Lower East Side, often leaving the movies. I’d wave and he’d return the gesture and a sly grin—and then he was off, headed to the next thing.

Sakamoto has never ceased to be productive, even when his health made it difficult. In 2014, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and not long after wrote his late-career masterpiece async in the throes of treatment. As a production, it is one of Sakamoto’s finest, even in a canon defined by technical brilliance; as a series of compositions, it is his darkest, an unflinching meditation on mortality that alternates between somber piano etudes and haunted drones.

Earlier this year, he released what would be his last album, 12, recorded after a second diagnosis of cancer between spring of 2021 and 2022. A sparser and narrower work than async, the dozen new instrumental pieces leaned heavily on ambient overtones, with an occasional respite for the melody of a piano. Each song was untitled, and instead, bore the date it was composed—a record of living, day by day.

But for many, the most recognizable of Sakamoto’s oeuvre is defined by elation, idiosyncrasy, and a sense of humor. Publicly, he was never more popular than he was in the ‘70s, as the keyboardist in Haroumi Hosono’s electronic pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra. A heartthrob with  high cheekbones and swoop of hair, it was Sakamoto’s polyrhythmic grooves that propelled the band to acclaim beyond Tokyo. Much of early hip-hop owes its sound to the band’s novel approach to sampling and looping. And you wouldn’t have had the U.S. or U.K.’s new wave movement without Sakamoto’s ingenuity with the Moog synthesizer and Roland TR-808.

Sakamoto’s solo records proved equally significant, continuing to unlock the potential of nascent music hardware. He was a pioneer of synths, sequencers, and drum machines; though his fame was, at the time, confined mostly to Japan, his work was foundational for pop, electronica, and hip-hop around the world. He collaborated with David Byrne, Iggy Pop, and Thomas Dolby. Often cited by music historians is the breakbeat jam of “Riot in Lagos” from B-2 Unit, a dimension-expanding template of what rhythm could bring to popular music. (The Guardian called it the sixth most important event in the history of dance music.)

But if you listen to “Riot in Lagos” today, you’ll hear its influence not just in music, but in a lifetime of art defined by blips and bloops: videogames, computer interfaces, ringtones (he would actually compose several for Nokia in the early aughts). The last decade’s appreciation for Sakamoto’s work has swelled thanks to the internet’s context collapse. The music of Yellow Magic Orchestra, along with other artists of the era, has been retroactively dubbed “city pop”—a Tumblr/YouTube-ified reappreciation of Japanese music in the ‘70s and ‘80s, paired aesthetically, of course, with completely unrelated clips of anime.

While it may be easy to cast Sakamoto as some kind of sonic futurist for his contributions to music’s embrace of technology, he was always possessed by the classical forms of the medium. As a teenager, he was obsessed with Claude Debussy. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, Sakamoto continued experimenting with pop music, but he became better known for scoring films. A cinephile himself, he moved to New York and was attached to works by some of Hollywood’s great auteurs: de Palma, Almodóvar, Iñárritu, and Bertolucci, whose 1987 film The Last Emperor would win Sakamoto an Academy Award for Best Original Score. 

The most famous of his film compositions might be “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” written for the David Bowie-starring film of the same name (in which Sakamoto briefly appears). He then recast it with vocals for David Sylvian titled “Forbidden Colours”; later, he would arrange the song for an instrumental trio and perform it until his final public concert. All three recordings are excellent, and express the way Sakamoto’s songwriting transcends form—or maybe he was just talented at music in all its mediums.

I spoke with him in 2018 ahead of the release of a short documentary about his life. For a former pop icon, whose face had appeared on many albums and magazine covers, he was pretty shy. (He liked the film, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, because it was “not too long.”) I’d set down a plastic recording device, plus my phone as backup, and he proceeded to play with both throughout the interview.

Over coffee at a sleepy restaurant in the West Village, we talked about the film, and then he expanded on his larger philosophies of music. At first, the conversation sounded, frankly, a little woo-woo for me: human beings, the natural world, the connection between the two. But as he continued, I began to understand what he meant: that relationship was one of tension. All music is artificial, he said. People craft it with material from nature. In fact, art is an abuse of nature, of sorts. The thought pained him.

And yet, he could not resist. He admits it was a contradiction. “But I do want to make my own sound, make my own music… That’s the true desire.” How else would he survive?

Sakamoto has always pursued that desire. His inexhaustible curiosity and relentless work ethic left us with a prolific output, from the internationally beloved techno pop of Yellow Magic Orchestra to the introspective experimentation of his ambient works to the playlist he made for that one restaurant in Murray Hill. Music sounds the way it does today because Sakamoto fiddled with early synthesizers.

As a film, Coda is less interested in the breadth of Sakamoto’s career, but more in the thematic weight of his philosophy about technology and naturalism. At one point in the documentary, seated in front of his Steinway grand, Sakamoto explains how the music of his piano was made possible only by the industrial revolution. A combination of wood and string and “tremendous force” to produce an instrument, a technology to create music.

“Matter taken from nature is molded by human industry, by the sum strength of civilization,” he says in the film. “Nature is forced into shape.”

Which is to suggest that this shape is temporary, and eventually, everything returns to its natural form. That the instruments—whether digital or organic—are just tools, that existence is an ephemeral state, that if we are lucky with our time on Earth, we might use those things to make something that endures. Ryuichi Sakamoto chose sound.

Kevin Nguyen is the author of New Waves and a features editor at The Verge. He is a former GQ editor.