I watched CODA, two years ago on a day off. I had been working in customer service, very drained from a busy week. I went to an afternoon screening with a fellow Sakamoto admirer. The film follows him as he recovers from throat cancer and potentially goes about creating his final album, ‘Async’. He draws from the sound of Sergei Tarkovsky movies as an influence and searches for sounds and textures. ‘Async’ – Asynchronous, Sakamoto wanted the music to be without a clear tempo, and for the sounds and textures to be without synchronization. In a sense reflecting the setting of the world and it’s chaotic nature, for the sound to be natural and to feel not organized. All human made art is a process of organized thought & structures, in essence it is a perhaps a response to try and have control over the chaos of the natural world.
I was very interested in the ‘Tsunami Piano’ that Ryuichi had located in wreckage of the Tsunami and Earthquake in Japan in 2009. Of which Sakamoto had to say…
“I went to see one of those pianos drowned in tsunami water near Fukushima and recorded it. Of course, it was totally out of tune, but I thought it was beautiful. I thought, ‘Nature tuned it.'”
Sakamoto, In “Coda”
Sakamoto has since used this Piano on a number of different projects. It is featured on the album ‘a-sync’ which the documentary Coda is largely based around.
Life, Life. David Sylvian, singer from new-wave band Japan, reads out the poem by Arseny Tarkovsky.
The music is built mainly around spacious elements, which is reflected in Sakamoto’s previous compositional work for The Revenant. A long vortex of reverb. It also can be linked back to this 80s on experimental album Esperanto. Textural layering. Disparate synthetic elements layered atop each other. Sakamoto’s ear for harmony and classical piano training often will naturally veer these pieces into quite satisfying harmonic conclusions. When compared to his more mainstream work for film throughout the 80s, with The Last Emperor and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence it is a real departure in it’s construction.
Here is some collaborative work between Sakamoto and Alva Noto, the German visual artist and electronic-based composer. Alva Noto providing glitchy synthesis over Sakamoto’s nostalgic framing through stripped and bare-sounding piano chords/intervals.
Sakamoto has also worked with guitarist Fennesz, whose work I am familiar with through some striking ambient albums in collaboration with Jim O’Rourke. Which I am hoping to explore in another post, with other relevant avant-garde guitarists.