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.
#RYUICHI SAKAMOTO B2 UNIT RAR FREE#
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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