async at the Park Avenue Armory

In the process of making the album async, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto was followed by documentary maker and director Stephen Nomura Schible, who not only filmed the album presentation, but also made the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda about him. Schible shows how Sakamoto approaches his work while at the same time recovering from throat cancer. In the documentary, Sakamoto says: ‘All sounds are inevitable. All street noise is there for a reason. People claim the freedom to decide what sounds are good or bad. Everyone should listen to sounds without judging’. 

Abrasive sound

Sakamoto focuses on everyday sounds and sounds from nature. He takes inspiration from John Cage, who once said ‘sounds should be allowed to be themselves’, as well as from film director Andrei Tarkovsky, who pays considerable attention to nature and natural sounds in his films. For example, Coda shows Sakamoto ‘fish up’ the sounds of the icy water from under arctic ice, as well as him playing a piano that was damaged by the tsunami near Fukushima, its sound warped by nature. These sounds can also be heard on his personal album async. Sakamoto about async ‘I decided not to use conventional musical forms on async. The structure of a sonata, a form Handel and Mozart often used in the 18th century, is rather rigid. Even pop songs have some sort of form. I wanted nothing of it. Every track on async came out of wholly spontaneous discoveries, without any formal ideas. I wanted to find the right form for each song. But nearly every time I made something, I had to ask myself, “What do you want to hear?” Maybe nothing, and that’s alright. My desire was the only rule. I make my solo work entirely for myself, so the only real measure is how satisfied I am with it and whether I feel I reached a different level for myself.’ Schible on filming the live performance of async ‘Ryuichi is the type of performer who does things different every time. So all we could do was to keep specific setups in mind as we filmed in a single take. I talked to my wonderful team of camera operators via their headsets while I worked behind a large monitor in a separate room. We had to follow everything that he did as well as we could. You could say we tried to dance to the music (...) I like working like this when I film performances. I feel it brings a certain kind of tension and deeper reality to the screen.’