I spoke with him in 2018 ahead of the release of a short documentary about his life. For a former pop icon, whose face had appeared on many albums and magazine covers, he was pretty shy. (He liked the film, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, because it was “not too long.”) I’d set down a plastic recording device, plus my phone as backup, and he proceeded to play with both throughout the interview.
Over coffee at a sleepy restaurant in the West Village, we talked about the film, and then he expanded on his larger philosophies of music. At first, the conversation sounded, frankly, a little woo-woo for me: human beings, the natural world, the connection between the two. But as he continued, I began to understand what he meant: that relationship was one of tension. All music is artificial, he said. People craft it with material from nature. In fact, art is an abuse of nature, of sorts. The thought pained him.
And yet, he could not resist. He admits it was a contradiction. “But I do want to make my own sound, make my own music… That’s the true desire.” How else would he survive?
Sakamoto has always pursued that desire. His inexhaustible curiosity and relentless work ethic left us with a prolific output, from the internationally beloved techno pop of Yellow Magic Orchestra to the introspective experimentation of his ambient works to the playlist he made for that one restaurant in Murray Hill. Music sounds the way it does today because Sakamoto fiddled with early synthesizers.
As a film, Coda is less interested in the breadth of Sakamoto’s career, but more in the thematic weight of his philosophy about technology and naturalism. At one point in the documentary, seated in front of his Steinway grand, Sakamoto explains how the music of his piano was made possible only by the industrial revolution. A combination of wood and string and “tremendous force” to produce an instrument, a technology to create music.
“Matter taken from nature is molded by human industry, by the sum strength of civilization,” he says in the film. “Nature is forced into shape.”
Which is to suggest that this shape is temporary, and eventually, everything returns to its natural form. That the instruments—whether digital or organic—are just tools, that existence is an ephemeral state, that if we are lucky with our time on Earth, we might use those things to make something that endures. Ryuichi Sakamoto chose sound.
Kevin Nguyen is the author of New Waves and a features editor at The Verge. He is a former GQ editor.
Kevin Nguyen
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