Ryuichi Sakamoto Examines Death

As fate would have it, Ryuichi Sakamoto released his new album, 12, three days after the death of one of his precious brothers in arms, Yukihiro Takahashi, drummer and singer of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pop group that launched their career in the late 70s and early 80s. Sakamoto has been playing hide and seek with death since 2014. The battle against cancer that Japan's most famous musician has embarked on is inevitably present throughout 12. Present but not anaesthetising. Five years after async, his last solo studio opus released in 2017, Ryuichi Sakamoto purifies his approach and aims for the essential. The title of the record refers to twelve themes ranging from 1'08 to 9'09, recorded between the 10th of March 2021 and the 4th of April 2022.

The illness left no respite for the Japanese man who blew out all 71 candles on the 17th of January. "After finally returning to my new temporary home after a major operation, I found myself reaching for the synthesiser. I had no intention of composing anything. I just wanted to be inundated with sound. I will probably continue to keep this kind of diary." These words from Ryuichi Sakamoto resonate naturally as you listen to 12. One closes one's eyes and imagines an artist physically weakened but mentally carried by a powerful grace; even superpowered.

"Flooded with sound": it's all there! These intimate sensations make you shiver throughout this very ambient record. The Brian Eno elements of Ambient 1: Music for Airports and Music for Films are not too distant at times. As is the influence of some of the recordings Sakamoto has co-written with the German Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto since the early 2000s. The tense sequences give way to more serene, even evanescent, synthetic but viscerally organic layers. The weight of the disease sometimes floats in the atmosphere, but it is above all the melodic, rhythmic or harmonic attacks that Sakamoto opposes that take over. As if enveloped by this great impressionist cloak, one no longer thinks of anything. We are caught up in life.

LISTEN TO "12" BY RYUICHI SAKAMOTO ON QOBUZ