But what makes Nagasaki special is the way Sakamoto evokes deep feeling without easy sentiment or maudlin clichés. The score he created is masterfully emotional, to the point where you don't have to see the film to feel the gravity of its plot. Making things even heavier, this would be Sakomoto's first score since recovering from throat cancer last year. It's a heavy, heartbreaking tale, for which veteran composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was tasked with creating appropriately poignant music. Directed last year by 84-year-old legend Yoji Yamada, it stars longtime actor Sayuri Yoshinaga as a mother whose son dies in the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki and visits her as a ghost until she herself passes on. Just reading about the Japanese film Nagasaki: Memories Of My Son is enough to get you choked up. Everyone in the room could see it too.Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nagasaki: Memories Of My Son. As he did so, he was made to look directly at his reflection.
During "ZURE," he got up from the piano and began tapping and rubbing a large pane of glass with an assortment of mallets, coaxing out groans and rumbles. Sakamoto played vertical metal rods with a bow and, with a mallet, gently struck a meter-long comb-like object.
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He's said that async contains some of his most personal music, and he played the album in full except for its atonal title track and "Stakra."Īlongside the piano, guitar and a table containing an oscillator, a Prophet-5 synth and a laptop, were a few other objects that didn't resemble musical instruments. As the somber chords of "Ubi" sounded late in the performance, Sakamoto looked upward at this latter scene. Takatani's work also fixates on water-onscreen, waves gently lapped on a beach and ripples on a watery surface disfigured an otherwise pristine view of clouds overhead. Waves are a complex subject for Sakamoto, who understands them as markers of time and containers of worlds, but who was also a vocal proponent of aid for Japan after the tsunami in 2011. Natural phenomena feature prominently on async, both in field recordings and in the words of American writer Paul Bowles ("How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?") and Soviet poet Tarkovsky ("Wave follows wave to break on the shore / On each wave is a star, a person, a bird"). The same goes for a shot of a bird's eye view of a piano, which appears in the LP's liner notes. It's clear, though, that the visual artist had worked on the album's general aesthetic, as the source image used for the cover showed up onscreen. Leading with album openers "Andata" and "Disintegration," Sakamoto stood hunched over the front of a piano, scratching muted piano strings with his fingers as muddy views of a coastal city shone overhead.įor the most part, the music didn't directly correspond to the film's images, except when Takatani depicted the hastening chimes of "Tri" as rain drops falling on water. Suspended above Sakamoto in the middle of the room was a downward-facing projection screen whose visuals changed with each piece of music. As he tells it, the record is "a soundtrack for an Andrei Tarkovsky film that does not exist." Tuesday's performance was a collaboration with the artist Shiro Takatani, who had, it seems, envisioned a film for this filmless soundtrack. Then, some point after he'd finished recording async, his first solo album in eight years, he decided that the Veterans Room would be the ideal place to premiere it. Sakamoto was invited at a time when he wasn't sure what he might perform. These qualities, as well as the fact that the room is only able to hold around 100 seated guests, accounted for the scarcity of tickets to Sakamoto's two performances on April 25th and 26th. Of the Veterans Room, Decorator And Furnisher magazine wrote in 1885 that "the prepondering styles appear to be the Greek, Moresque and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, the Persian and Japanese in the appropriate places." Though parts of it have recently been restored, it does feel like a time capsule of the American Aesthetic Movement, filled with intricately patterned moldings, wrought-iron filigreed chandeliers and stained glass. Later, I'd think of my oblivious proximity to Björk as a fittingly enchanted cap to an already enchanting evening. "Who?" "Björk was standing right beside you while you were just talking." I looked back but she'd disappeared behind the curtain that separated the lobby from the hall leading to the Park Avenue Armory's Veterans Room. After a couple of minutes we parted ways and I returned to the friend I'd come with.
As I stood ogling Ryuichi Sakamoto's instruments while the room cleared out, I heard a friend call my name, and we went into the lobby to chat.