Last month, we lost Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was an absolute monster of an artist and since hearing the news I’ve been going back and listening to a bunch of his catalog, which is not only massive, but it’s also incredibly diverse.
There are certain artists whose work allows you to see the world differently. If they’re really good, they might even allow you to feel it differently. Ryuichi Sakamoto was one of those artists. He worked across multiple musical genres and he was able to tap into and even affect different aspects of the human experience. I think the first piece of Ryuichi’s music I heard was Forbidden Colors, which is a vocal version of the theme to a film he scored and acted in alongside David Bowie called Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. It was also the first of what would be decades of brilliant collaborations with former Japan frontman David Sylvian. A friend in college had reintroduced me to David, who I was familiar with from Japan, but it was his solo record Secrets of the Beehive, which featured Forbidden Colors as a bonus track, that introduced me to Ryuichi and I’ve been a fan ever since.
I’m not familiar with everything he ever did, but I’ve listened to his band Yellow Magic Orchestra—who basically invented technopop—a bunch of his solo records, and quite a few of his film scores, not to mention numerous collaborations he's done over the years. I’ve also read enough about him to know that his approach to making music was often deeply profound. For example, in an interview with Brandon Stosuy, Ryuichi was asked about a project he was working on using a piano that was damaged by the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan. He responded, saying, “My idea is to get the realtime earthquake data of the world, the whole world, and transform the data to MIDI signals, to play the piano. So the piano, damaged by the tsunami, is now a device to express the vibrations of our planet.” The resulting record is a beautifully somber ambient recording called async.
I think one of the things I love most about Ryuichi is how broad his influences and collaborations were—musical and otherwise—which allowed him to draw from an enormous pool of inspiration for his own music. It’s easy to get locked into a sort of comfort zone when it comes to inspiration and, even if you’re diving deeper, it’s often deeper into what you already know—photographers looking only at other photographers, for example. Getting uncomfortable with your influences and allowing them to inspire your work is often where the real transformation can happen.
When I was in high school, I had a friend who had terrific taste in music and it was music that I’d never really heard before—bands like Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. He was a musician himself and in fact played drums in a Yes cover band called Cinema. But in addition to introducing me to the music, he encouraged me to start looking at liner notes to see not just lyrics and who was in the band, but who else played on the record, who engineered it, or who did the album art, all of which changed how I was able to appreciate music. In 1982, Asia released their debut album, which was a huge record—I think it sold over 10 million copies. While Asia itself was a “new” band, the members were all former members of massive other bands who I never would have known had it not been for my friend. John Wetton was in King Crimson, Steve Howe and Geoff Downes were both in Yes, and Carl Palmer was the Palmer in Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. The cover art for their records was done by Roger Dean, who also did the art for a bunch of Yes records, including my favorite Tales From Topographic Oceans, and was the artist who really got me paying attention to album art as its own thing, which in turn led me to more music that I may not have listened to otherwise, not to mention other artists and designers. Hugh Syme, Storm Thorgerson, Mick Rock, Eric Meola, Hipgnosis, Reid Miles, and way too many others to mention are all names and work I know—and who have been inspiring me for decades—simply because I started reading liner notes and making connections.
In addition to music and art, learning what or who other people have been influenced by or are interested in has exposed me to books, movies, podcasts, and most importantly ideas that have absolutely changed the trajectory of my creative life. In some cases, they’ve just changed my life full stop. I used to get a little hung up about it, thinking that I was just ripping off their ideas, but I don’t think that’s the case. Giving ourselves permission to follow the inspiration of others and trace their paths provides the opportunity to let those thoughts and ideas move through us and come out the other side as something unique, or at least different to how they began. Thinking about all of this reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Steve Jobs. He said, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
I couldn’t really find a place to work this into this Iteration, but one of the songs on Ryuichi’s record async is a beautiful collaboration with David Sylvian. The track is called Life, Life and it’s Ryuichi’s music with David reading a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky over the top of it.
Just last week I was looking at a photograph of someone and there was a poster of Yellow Magic Orchestra on their bedroom wall. This led me to Firecracker, which high I played on repeat who knows how many times. It took me way back to my youth, so then I spent many hours listening to more YMO, Japan (Quiet Life is such a fantastic track), David Sylvian, but I had forgotten about Forbidden Colours. Sakamoto’s death is such a loss.
Thanks for this, I am not familiar with Sakamoto but plan to jump down that hole and see where it leads. Heart felt moment bring Asia back to my mind, loved that album and had forgotten all about it, another thing to add to the queue.