Mr. Sakamoto based the Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, impressed by the German electronica group Kraftwerk, and it quickly emerged as Japan’s top-selling band.
Popularly generally known as YMO, the orchestra perfected a witty robotic pop that attracted legions of teenage followers in Japan and influenced the sound of every little thing from Nintendo online game scores to the techno style and hip-hop.
YMO had dance-floor hits in the USA with the funky synth tracks “Firecracker” and “Tighten Up,” which toyed with historical Japanese musical sounds and new know-how. They earned a spot on “Soul Practice” in 1980, the place they performed “Tighten Up” and their widespread music “Pc Recreation.”
Followers included Duran Duran and producer Todd Rundgren, and their music “Behind the Masks” was lined by Eric Clapton and Michael Jackson. “We had been very large,” Mr. Sakamoto instructed Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2008. “That’s why I hated it. We had been all the time adopted by paparazzi.”
The band broke up in 1983, and Mr. Sakamoto turned a prolific solo artist with forays into performing.
He performed a Japanese jail guard reverse one other musician, David Bowie, within the World Conflict II drama “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983). Mr. Sakamoto agreed to take the function provided that he may rating the film as effectively, and he composed a stutter-step predominant theme that mixed an Japanese pentatonic scale with French impressionism for a strikingly catchy end result.
“I attempted to make a Christmas music, as a result of it’s a Christmas movie,” he defined to the London Each day Telegraph in 2017. “However it’s additionally a fantasy story — a gathering of Western and Japanese gods — so I needed it to sound unique to each Western and Japanese ears.”
The rating, which featured synthesizers anachronistic for the movie’s historic setting, earned Mr. Sakamoto an award for finest film rating from the British Academy of Movie and Tv Arts.
Filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci employed Mr. Sakamoto to co-score the 1987 epic “The Final Emperor” alongside David Byrne of Speaking Heads and the Chinese language composer Cong Su. Mr. Sakamoto’s predominant theme was a 70-millimeter sized melody stuffed with romance and nostalgia.
The composers shared an Academy Award and a Grammy Award for his or her soundtrack rating. The movie, wherein Mr. Sakamoto performed a Japanese officer and ally of the emperor, additionally collected one of the best image Oscar.
Mr. Sakamoto reunited with Bertolucci on “The Sheltering Sky” (1990), starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger as a pair touring in North Africa amid marital ennui, and once more on “Little Buddha” (1993). Madonna solid him as a director in a music video inside a music video for her 1993 music “Rain.”
However Mr. Sakamoto was way more snug behind the display screen. He scored roughly 50 function movies, documentaries and tv tasks — together with “Wuthering Heights” (1992) starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, the 1993 miniseries “Wild Palms,” produced by Oliver Stone, and “Snake Eyes” (1998) and “Femme Fatale” (2002) for director Brian De Palma.
In 2015, filmmaker Alejandro Iñárrito requested Mr. Sakamoto to jot down music for his survivalist movie “The Revenant,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a frontiersman staving off vicious bears and the weather within the early nineteenth century.
Working with the German musician Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto used chilly synthesizers and layers of sound and approximated gradual, heavy breaths for this story a couple of man’s return from close to dying.
Shortly earlier than taking the task, Mr. Sakamoto mentioned he had recovered from throat most cancers and mentioned the sounds he created for “The Revenant” had been influenced by what he known as “the closest second to dying in my life.”
Ryuichi Sakamoto was born in Tokyo on Jan. 17, 1952. His father was a distinguished editor who labored on books by Yukio Mishima and Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.
“I bear in mind our home was all the time stuffed with writers, poets and artistic individuals who had been type of outcasts in Japanese society, sitting round speaking and ingesting all evening,” Mr. Sakamoto instructed the Occasions of London. “I used to be very acutely aware of being totally different from different folks; it felt pure to be totally different.”
His mom designed ladies’s hats and performed the piano, exposing him to classical music from infancy. Mr. Sakamoto began enjoying piano when he was 3, and was writing music at 10. He grew up on a gentle weight-reduction plan of Western tradition, from TV westerns to the Beatles, however he additionally gravitated towards the daring work of composer John Cage and French New Wave movies.
“They destroyed classical guidelines and ideas,” he instructed the Los Angeles Occasions in 1992. “I used to be taking extra conventional European composing and piano lessons, they usually had all these guidelines, international guidelines. Individuals like Cage let music and artwork be free.”
Throughout highschool within the Sixties, he attended anti-Vietnam demonstrations and jazz golf equipment, forming a band together with his mates to play bossa nova and Miles Davis music.
Within the mid-Seventies, at what’s now Tokyo College of the Arts, he acquired a grasp’s diploma in music composition but in addition turned intensely dedicated to the examine of digital and ethnic music.
For his many solo albums, Mr. Sakamoto used the time period “Neo Geo” to explain a musical melting pot with no geographical borders.
“I’ve a cultural map in my head,” he instructed the Each day Telegraph in 2002, “the place I discover similarities between totally different cultures. For instance, home Japanese pop music feels like Arabic music to me — the vocal intonations and vibrato — and, in my thoughts, Bali is subsequent to New York. Possibly everybody has these geographies of their head. That is the best way I’ve been working.”
On the 1989 album “Magnificence,” he performed in a nine-piece band with musicians from England, the USA, Brazil and Japan. In 1997 he launched “Discord,” a piece in 4 actions that mixed a 70-piece orchestra, a DJ and textual content narrated by Bertolucci, Byrne and Patti Smith, that Mr. Sakamoto wrote based mostly on his conversations with former Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev and the Dalai Lama about salvation.
In 2001, Mr. Sakamoto recorded a whole album of bossa nova — “Casa” — that was recorded in Rio de Janeiro on the dwelling of the late Antonio Carlos Jobim, utilizing the identical piano on which Jobin wrote “The Woman From Ipanema.”
He turned more and more involved in regards to the setting, particularly after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan. He recorded music on a waterlogged piano in a faculty destroyed by the ensuing tsunami and included these and different sounds harvested from forests and oceans into the 2017 album “async.”
Mr. Sakamoto, who had lived in New York Metropolis since 1990, was married a number of instances, together with to pop singer Akiko Yano. Survivors embrace his spouse Norika Sora, who was additionally his supervisor; and a number of other youngsters, together with singer Miu Yamaguchi from his marriage to Yano. An entire record of survivors was not instantly accessible.
At any given second, Mr. Sakamoto is perhaps writing an opera, collaborating with such artists as Brian Wilson or Iggy Pop, or doing a world tour the place he performed duets with himself through computer-programmed piano — constantly evading straightforward categorization
“When the Tower Information outlets nonetheless existed, I had numerous complaints from the folks on the outlets, as a result of they didn’t know which CD ought to go to which field,” he instructed Movie Rating Month-to-month in 2010.
“It appears my listeners settle for what I do,” he added. “Lastly they acknowledge, ‘That’s Sakamoto. He goes this fashion, however subsequent time this fashion.’”
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