Ryuichi Sakamoto must be the most low-key megastar around. He came to prominence with the witty electro of Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s, then with some era-defining soundtracks like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor in the 1980s. Latterly, though, his work has been quite extraordinarily subdued and experimental – collaborations with far-leftfield glitch, electronica and ambient luminaries like Christian Fennesz, Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto, Sachiko M and Taylor Deupree – yet interest in him remains so great that when I published a short interview with him and Deupree last year it was read and shared hundreds of thousands of times: way more than one would ever expect for an artist so out-there.
So it was fascinating to see what he would come out with when he pursued a more mainstream project: the soundtrack for big-budget but bleak man-vs-nature western The Revenant. He hasn't disappointed. This soundtrack, which works perfectly as a standalone album, has super high production values and classical elements (orchestrated by Bryce Dessener of big-league indie band The National and experimental side-project Clogs), but it remains as strange and removed from quotidian reality as any of his small-label experiments of the 2000s: previous collaborator Alva Noto is co-producer.
This is ambient music in its truest form: hazy forms hang in the air, closer to scents or fluctuations in temperature in their evocative intangibility than to anything more representative – yet it is as emotionally powerful as any grandiose melody. It's tempting to question whether the sense of stasis and disappearance in Sakamoto's latterday music is related to his own brushes with mortality – he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 – but actually when presented with sound-making this stately and perfect in its ineffability, all mundane explanations seem small and petty in comparison. Sakamoto's popularity and status as one of the greatest living musicians is entirely deserved.
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