Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda and async at the Park Avenue Armory

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work is known for responding to even the smallest environmental shifts and tensions. This mindfulness is at times expressed in the mixing of familiar tones and textures of life with manufactured and erratic sounds, such as those produced by the water-damaged grand piano he discovered after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.

Sakamoto finds inspiration in unrelated sources—from the physical world to movie scores, from experimental music to ethnomusicology. Following the Fukushima accident, he was inspired by the antinuclear power movement; following his own cancer treatments, he created the very personal async solo album. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, shot over a span of five years, is an understated portrait that sheds light on one of the most fascinating musical minds of our era. (Stephen Nomura Schible, 2017, 100 minutes)

async at the Park Avenue Armory

Sakamoto’s concert performance of async at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City was recorded live in April 2017. The composition, one of his first major efforts after treatments for throat cancer, reveals a fragile sense of impermanence and mortality in every passage. Unlike earlier work in which he combined pop and nontraditional modalities, async leans toward recent collaborations with musicians Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Christopher Willits, inspired, in Sakamoto’s words, by “everyday objects, sculpture, and nature.” Stephen Nomura Schible recorded with his digital camera the entire landmark Park Avenue Armory concert—which also features Sakamoto’s longtime visual and theatrical collaborator Shiro Takatani. (Stephen Nomura Schible, 2018, 65 minutes)