Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music Lasts Forever (2/2)

A SUPER EDITOR’S CHOICE

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Ryuichi Sakamoto was lucky when he was young. He received an excellent education and met a group of talented Japanese musicians very early. Although the YMO band disbanded soon after, this experience was very precious to Sakamoto. After YMO, Sakamoto embarked on his own musical path:

4 Legends in the film world

In the YMO era, Ryuichi Sakamoto was exploring inwardly. When the band ended, his accumulated ability began to rebound. More importantly, Ryuichi Sakamoto never set limits for himself. He wrote in his memoirs:

"When I was in elementary school, the teacher would ask everyone to write down 'My Dream', but I had no idea what to write. I couldn't imagine myself becoming another identity, engaging in a regular job, and it was also a concept that I had some difficulty understanding.”

Perhaps it is this lack of identity restrictions and the shackles of fixed self-awareness that pushed Sakamoto to a broader field and began to experiment with various types of music, and even went outside of music.

In 1982, Ryuichi Sakamoto's idol Nagisa Oshima invited him to star in a new film in which he played the leading role.

Ryuichi Sakamoto did not directly agree, but said: "Please let me do the scores."

Nagisa Oshima readily agreed to him. The film they made tighter was the famous Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983).

In the film, Sakamoto's character and David Bowie's character bring a sad love affair to the audiences, and the theme song composed by Sakamoto for the movie has become his most well-known work.

The soundtrack is so well-known that it even takes away the light of the film. The endless cycle of the main theme arias, under the ethereal sound effects, those imprisoned feelings seem to melt into every note of the tune.

Later, when Sakamoto composed the soundtrack for Call Me by Your Name (2017）, he used the main theme of the film soundtrack in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence again.

As we all know, the film also made Takeshi Kitano popular in the future, but what is not known is that Sakamoto wrote a song for him after the film ended, and co-produced an album "AM 3:25 ビートたけし "

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence received great acclaim after its release, and its original soundtrack also received unanimous praise, and finally won the British Academy Film Awards for Best Sound, opening the door to a new world for Sakamoto.

The film was shortlisted for the Cannes Film Festival that year. Here, Ryuichi Sakamoto met Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. Bertolucci told Sakamoto of his plan for a new film The Last Emperor (1987) and invited him to play a small role.

Bernardo Bertolucci

In 1986, Ryuichi Sakamoto came to Beijing to play Masahiko Amakasu, the president of the Manchukuo Film Association in The Last Emperor. Although Sakamoto didn't have many scenes, he still didn't dare to scorn at all and took every scene seriously.

During the filming process, the emotional relationship between Ryuichi Sakamoto and actress Vivian Wu became gossip in the future after dinner.

In an interview, Vivian Wu mentioned her past relationship experience. She revealed that she had a passionate relationship with a "big star" in Japan when she was around 25 years old. Wu did not disclose, only saying "Now I dare not say who he is".

Then some netizens speculated that this "Japanese superstar" might be Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Shortly after the filming ended, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had participated in the film as an actor, returned to New York City to prepare for a new recording job, but at this time he received a call from the producer, asking him to make the soundtrack.

In just two weeks, Ryuichi Sakamoto completed the entire soundtrack and wrote 44 pieces of music. Under the magnificent arrangement of instrumental music, the vicissitudes and heavy sense of history are undoubtedly evident.

But when the film was released, the complete soundtrack was edited to pieces, and an angry Ryuichi Sakamoto had a big fight with the director. (but soon collaborated again).

However, this cannot conceal the magic of Sakamoto Ryuichi. The soundtrack of The Last Emperor finally won the Oscar for best soundtrack, and Sakamoto Ryuichi also became the first Japanese to win this award.

The success of the soundtracks of these two films has established Ryuichi Sakamoto's position in the film soundtrack industry. Later, the soundtracks produced for films such as The Shelterling Sky (1990), The Revenant (2015) and TV series Black Mirror have also won many awards.

He has been wandering between image and sound, trying to combine the two perfectly, creating infinite possibilities in a limited space.

5 "How many more times will you see the full moon rise?"

In the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA (2017), there was such a scene:

Ryuichi Sakamoto saw an old Yamaha piano in a dilapidated auditorium, which was submerged and soaked by seawater in the tsunami triggered by the earthquake in Japan.

Ryuichi Sakamoto put his fingers on the keys and began to play, feeling like he was playing "a drowned piano corpse". Although the sound does not sound so harmonious, in his opinion, this is the beauty of nature:

"People say it's out of tune, it’s not, but these natural substances are desperately struggling to return to their previous form. The waves surged up in an instant, and the piano returned to its natural form. I feel that after natural tuning The piano sound feels particularly good."

Later, he used this piano to record his first new album "async" in 8 years:

In this album, Sakamoto's music is more and more restrained and concise, which seems to be talking about his records and reflections on the real world.

The achievements of film soundtracks did not restrict him here. In the decades after YMO disbanded, Ryuichi Sakamoto continued to explore music more freely.

In addition to continuing to deepen in pop music, he spends more energy exploring experimental and ambient music. His music does not have familiar melodies, and may not be "good", but if the music only conveys the melody, it is too boring.

Examining and thinking about people made Ryuichi Sakamoto's later works slightly gloomy until he witnessed the 9/11 incident with his own eyes, and he began to completely turn to the social themes of anti-war and natural environmental protection.

He began to connect music with human nature and society, trying to abandon the complicated emotional rendering and let the music convey the truth.

In the documentary, you will see him traveling around the world, looking for the possibility of sound:

In Kenya, he listened to the music of primitive tribes; in the silence of the Arctic, he beat a small gong, and the sound was clear and ethereal; he put the recording pen into the stream of the Arctic glacier, and he said he was "fishing"; in the wild, he recorded the sound of insects, birds, and grass; when it rains, put a plastic bucket on your head and listen to the collision of raindrops.

These voices will appear in his album "Async" (2009), and he doesn't want to leave regrets:

"People die at some point, and this may be my last album."

In the album, "fullmoon" and in the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA (2017) you can hear a line of dialogue repeatedly. This is the monologue in the film The Sheltering Sky (1990)that Ryuichi Sakamoto once composed.

He also collected original books in various languages, and circled this sentence in them:

"Because we don't know when we will die
We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well
And yet everything happens only a certain number of times
And a very small number really
How many more times will you remember
A certain afternoon of your childhood
Some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being
That you can't conceive of your life without it?
Perhaps four of five times more?
Perhaps not even that
How many more times will you watch the fuul moon rise?
Perhaps twenty
And yet it all seems limitless…