Ryuichi Sakamoto can be heard here, on Opus, surrounded by silence, shuffling at the keyboard, off-mic rustles and tells, recorded in the last year of his life, in September 2022 – he died early in the following year – as he sat to make his final performances.
Not in public – there's not even the ghost of an audience here – but at Tokyo's NHK Broadcast Center's 509 Studio, in a solo performance filmed by his son Neo Sora, for which this is the soundtrack. Five decades of film and Yellow Magic music are spread between the two hands of one performer across 88 keys, and it feels like he's playing very close by. It’s hushed, stilled, limpid, stately, a minimalism that’s next door to silence. It’s a bit ghostly too, as if this music carries a substance unfamiliar to the state of living.
There are 20 selections, drawing from his music for films ranging from Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, through art-house classics The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha and The Revenant, as well as pieces from the Yellow Magic Orchestra’s catalogue and his 2023 solo album 12. Pieces such as "Andata", "Aqua" and "Trioon" are set alongside previously unheard compositions that include "For Jóhann", dedicated to the late composer and Sakamoto’s friend, Johann Johannson, "BB", a tribute to filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, for whom, he scored some of his finest music, and "20180219", a previously unreleased solo piano piece.
The likes of “Icxhemai – Small Happiness” almost out-Satie Satie at his most spectral, while the spectral clang of chords on "20180219" is reminiscent of Cage’s experiments in prepared piano. “The Sheltering Sky”, "The Last Emperor” and “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence” compress these more familiar pieces into new structures in the medium of solo piano.
Sakamoto himself wrote movingly of these recording sessions-cum-final performances: “While thinking of this as my last opportunity to perform, I also felt that I was able to break new ground,” he said, “Simply playing a few songs a day with a lot of concentration was all I could muster at this point in my life. Perhaps due to the exertion, I felt utterly hollow afterwards, and my condition worsened for about a month. Even so, I feel relieved that I was able to record before my death a performance that I was satisfied with.”
The stillness and poise, a sonic slow-motion playing out on some subtle fractal sonic wave that never breaks makes this set startling and arresting, as quiet as it is. Meditiative, too. Good for the early hours. The film composer in deep focus, as slowly, he fades out of hearing distance, the closing notes of “Opus – Ending” reminiscent of the tale of the Japanese painter whose last stroke of the brush sees him step out of his final painting.
