A good place to start with Sakamoto if you’re a fan of experiments for the dance-floor. Recorded in London with XTC’s Andy Partridge, as a whole it’s Sakamoto at his most adventurous, and marks a clear branching out from the populism of his work with YMO.
A staple in any worthwhile list of ’80s electronica, it’s no mistake of the imagination to hear some of the ground covered here, as the footholds that Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada would further launch from in the ’90s. Check out this live performance of ‘Firecracker’ on US variety show Soul Train for a blast of YMO at its best.ī2-Unit contains one of Sakamoto’s most seminal tracks – the years ahead of its time, funked-up electronic odyssey ‘Riot in Lagos’. That they were shooting for a mass international audience is no secret as group founder Haruomi Hosono targeted US listeners hoping the rest would follow suit, but the popularity they subsequently achieved didn’t always rest easy with Sakamoto, and in part instigated his move onto further solo projects. Whilst indelibly on the group’s musical radar, just referencing them as Japan’s answer to Kraftwerk is an injustice given the genres they explored album by album and their unique and oft humorous take on “Asianness” and its exotic perceptions. One of Sakamoto’s most influential and well known projects, as keyboardist for Yellow Magic Orchestra his work was projected onto the world stage, and inspired a generation of electronic musicians in its wake (check out Ken Ishii and Tesuo Inoue for a couple of fine examples). Sakamoto’s prowess on the piano also makes its first appearance amongst the electronics on Grasshoppers. Playful yet shying away from the atonal and questing to find new forms of expression through technology, this record would also impact his future production approach with the records of the recently formed Yellow Magic Orchestra. Informed by his diverse musical education and considerable experience within the developing age of Moog, Buchla and ARP synthesizers, the seeds of Sakamoto’s genre-blurring craft can be found in this one. Opening with a vocoded rendition of a Mao Zedong poem, before launching into a drum programmed synth panoply with guitar shred in tow, and all named after Henri Michaux’s description of the mescaline experience – Thousand Knives was quite a way to kick off a solo recording debut. In celebration of the LP release of his and Taylor’s performance at St John’s, the list below serves to explore some key works from the start of his career up to the present, and join some of the dots of a rich and multi-faceted body of work. So from an education in the conventional and non-conventional, a love of pop, rock and exotic sounds, the foundations of this vast discography were set.
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It was whilst studying at Tokyo’s University of Art that he became versed in the avant-garde and free improvisation, and also discovered the music of Claude Debussy, which has proved to be an enduring influence on his piano playing. Growing up amidst the post-war Westernization of Japan, Sakamoto’s first musical loves were The Beatles, alongside Bach and Chopin. His musical and career boundaries are decidedly on a map of his own making.
Here is a musician who is also an actor, soundtrack composer, producer environmental activist, model, a prolific collaborator and who could release back-to-back albums of surreal, easy-listening inflected pop music next to a dissonant orchestral lament on famine. Such reactions are hardly surprising given Sakamoto’s expansive fan-base, accumulated through a vast discography and a 40-year career, which has covered innumerable styles and sought to actively defy genre-specifics. For some Sakamoto’s unconventional engagement with the piano was a sublime exercise in subtlety, texture and atmosphere, and for others a supposed “non-event”- alarming in its absence of the Satie-like melodies that are commonly expected of him. Whilst adventurous music can often have a polarizing effect, the emails and feedback St John Sessions received following Ryuichi Sakamoto and Taylor Deupree’s performance at St John at Hackney church in February 2014 were amusingly pronounced. From the synth funk mastery of Yellow Magic Orchestra to minimal collaborations with Alva Noto, James Hammond unpicks ten milestones from the extraordinary career of Ryuichi Sakamoto.
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