Ryuichi Sakamoto, eclectic composer who noticed no borders, dies at 71

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 the whole lot from Nintendo online game scores to the techno style and hip-hop.

YMO had dance-floor hits in the US 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 Train” in 1980, the place they performed “Tighten Up” and their standard music “Pc Recreation.”

Followers included Duran Duran and producer Todd Rundgren, and their music “Behind the Mask” was coated by Eric Clapton and Michael Jackson. “We had been very large,” Mr. Sakamoto advised Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2008. “That’s why I hated it. We had been at all times adopted by paparazzi.”

The band broke up in 1983, and Mr. Sakamoto grew to become a prolific solo artist with forays into appearing.

He performed a Japanese jail guard reverse one other musician, David Bowie, within the World Warfare II drama “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” (1983). Mr. Sakamoto agreed to take the position provided that he may rating the film as nicely, and he composed a stutter-step foremost theme that mixed an Japanese pentatonic scale with French impressionism for a strikingly catchy end result.

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“I attempted to make a Christmas music, as a result of it’s a Christmas movie,” he explained to the London Daily Telegraph in 2017. “However it’s additionally a fantasy story — a gathering of Western and Japanese gods — so I wished 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 Last Emperor” alongside David Byrne of Speaking Heads and the Chinese language composer Cong Su. Mr. Sakamoto’s main theme was a 70-millimeter sized melody filled 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 the perfect 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 forged him as a director in a music video inside a music video for her 1993 music “Rain.”

However Mr. Sakamoto was way more comfy behind the display. He scored roughly 50 characteristic 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 write 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 sluggish, heavy breaths for this story a few man’s return from close to loss of life.

Shortly earlier than taking the task, Mr. Sakamoto stated he had recovered from throat most cancers and stated the sounds he created for “The Revenant” had been influenced by what he referred to as “the closest second to loss of life in my life.”

Ryuichi Sakamoto was born in Tokyo on Jan. 17, 1952. His father was a outstanding editor who labored on books by Yukio Mishima and Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe.

“I keep in mind our home was at all times filled with writers, poets and artistic individuals who had been type of outcasts in Japanese society, sitting round speaking and consuming all evening,” Mr. Sakamoto advised the Occasions of London. “I used to be very 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 loss program 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 advised the Los Angeles Occasions in 1992. “I used to be taking extra conventional European composing and piano lessons, and so they had all these guidelines, international guidelines. Folks 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 pals to play bossa nova and Miles Davis music.

Within the mid-Nineteen Seventies, at what’s now Tokyo College of the Arts, he obtained a grasp’s diploma in music composition but in addition grew to become 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 advised the Each day Telegraph in 2002, “the place I discover similarities between totally different cultures. For instance, home Japanese pop music appears 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 way in which I’ve been working.”

On the 1989 album “Magnificence,” he performed in a nine-piece band with musicians from England, the US, 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 grew to become more and more involved concerning the surroundings, particularly after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan. He recorded music on a waterlogged piano in a college destroyed by the ensuing tsunami and integrated 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 occasions, together with to pop singer Akiko Yano. Survivors embody his spouse Norika Sora, who was additionally his supervisor; and several other youngsters, together with singer Miu Sakamoto from his marriage to Yano. A whole checklist of survivors was not instantly accessible.

At any given second, Mr. Sakamoto is likely to be writing an opera, collaborating with such artists as Brian Wilson or Iggy Pop, or doing a global tour the place he performed duets with himself through computer-programmed piano — persistently evading simple categorization.

“When the Tower Data retailers nonetheless existed, I had numerous complaints from the folks on the retailers, as a result of they didn’t know which CD ought to go to which field,” he advised 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 manner, however subsequent time this manner.’”