Ryuichi Sakamoto - async

Pitchfork 80

Ambient music means many things in the present moment. Brian Eno’s Reflection from earlier this year presented its contemplative side, the recent compilation Mono No Aware posits it as a commentary of modern technology, and ambient musician Keith Fullerton Whitman rhetorically wondered: “What music isn’t ambient in the 21st century?” Its modern conception stems from a now-mythologized moment, when Eno was convalescing in a hospital bed after being hit by a cab, the playback on a harp record so low that it blended in with the sound of rain. It’s environmental, but from its inception, ambient music also has roots as a healing music.

Ambient as restorative comes to mind with async, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s sixteenth solo album. In June of 2014, the legendary Japanese composer was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent rigorous radiology treatment to combat it. Three years after that diagnosis, Sakamoto returns with an album bearing a sense of mortality surrounding its every sound. Unlike his ’80s heyday where Sakamoto fearlessly embraced pop and found himself in the studio with Iggy Pop, David Byrne, or Maceo Parker, async is more closely aligned with his 21st-century experimental side and his ongoing collaborations with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Christopher Willits. But there’s a warmth and fragility to the album here that makes it stand apart from these works.

A careful piano melody opens the album, with just enough space between the notes for a noisy chord to rise up and consume it all, shifting from white noise to solemn organ line, revealing both Sakamoto’s penchant for melody and texture and the gap between each. The copious reverb that surrounds each restrained note on “ZURE” would slot right in with Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series. In conceiving the album, the press release states that async was a soundtrack for an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film and the stately theme of “solari” does bring to mind Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterwork Solaris.

But it also hearkens back to Sakamoto’s acclaimed career as a soundtrack composer, scoring Nagisa Ôshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (where he acted alongside David Bowie) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (Sakamoto won an Oscar for Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) as well as recently scoring Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. For those familiar with the arc of Sakamoto’s four-decade long career, async seems to echo aspects of it all, as if Sakamoto sought to embrace his many iterations of self. The starbursts of “stakra” go back to his earliest days as a synth whiz kid in pioneering Japanese pop act Yellow Magic Orchestra while the stark and heartbreaking “ubi” recalls the Satie-like simplicity of his most famous composition, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” the piano shot through with satellite beacon signals. Detuned strings mimic the traditional koto on “honj” and comprise the
furious thrashing noise of the title track.

Near the center of the album, this primarily instrumental collection reveals two pieces with vocals, their words revealing another theme to the album. “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,” says author Paul Bowles, his voice recorded back when Sakamoto was scoring the film adaptation of his novel The Sheltering Sky. Repurposed here, it’s now set against a backdrop of sinewaves, bowed cymbal and spare piano as other voices gather around it. It’s a striking inclusion, a sentiment that no doubt resonated with Sakamoto as he faced his own mortality.

A few songs later, longtime collaborator David Sylvian’s voice arises, reciting a poem from Andrei Tarkovsky’s father, the famous Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky. Sylvian first collaborated with Sakamoto in in 1982, adding vocals a year later to the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence for the elegant ’80s song “Forbidden Colours,” a partnership that’s since carried on into the 21st century. “And all will be repeated, all be re-embodied/You will dream everything I have seen in dream,” Sylvian recites. “Dreams, reality, death, on wave after wave.” There’s an acceptance of mortality, of temporality, a gratitude for the life lived and Sakamoto puts elegiac strings and echoing piano about the poem, the end revealing a hushed melody that ever so slowly brightens in tone. There’s the sense of a weight lifted, the last two tracks bringing a luminous drone forth on “ff” and an ambient drift leading us out on closer “garden,” and in that hanging moment after the record ends, all are healed.