Ryuichi Sakamoto

World-renowned Japanese composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto has died at the age of 71 after battling cancer, his management company KAB America Inc.

He worked continuously until his later years, including the score for 2015 film 'The Revenant.' Four years later, he took home a Golden Globe and Oscar for best music for his score for the 'The Last Emperor.' Sakamoto wrote the score and starred alongside David Bowie in the 1983 film 'Merry Christmas, Mr.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Oscar-winning Japanese composer famed for his scores for The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and other films, has died aged ...

His most celebrated work was 1987's The Last Emperor — a film in which he also acted. So the music goes around the world and comes full circle," he told WNYC public radio in 2010. Introduced to the piano as a toddler, Sakamoto lived for music.

The renowned composer and producer has passed away aged 71.

[April 2, 2023] In 2014, Sakamoto was first diagnosed with throat cancer. Additionally, he composed the soundtrack for films such as The Last Emperor and The Revenant as well as 1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr Laurence in which he also starred in alongside David Bowie. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to his fans and all those who have supported his activities, as well as the medical professionals in Japan and the U.S. Born in 1952, Sakamoto took up piano from an early age and over the course of his creative career was a pioneer within electronic and ambient music. The post revealed that he passed away last week on 28 March.

Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”

Mr. In later years, Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. “Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. [synth-heavy title track](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9_9MZyQGo) remained one of Mr. Then came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). [Nagisa Oshima](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/movies/nagisa-oshima-iconoclastic-filmmaker-dies-at-80.html) asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, a world-renowned Japanese musician and actor who composed for Hollywood hits such as “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant,” has died.

“How we make electricity is going to diversify, with fossil fuel and nuclear power declining,” Sakamoto told The Associated Press in an interview in 2012. At his home in New York, he gets electricity from a company that relies on renewables, he said. The statement expressed gratitude to the doctors who had treated him in the U.S. Sakamoto also left his mark as a pacifist and environmental activist. “To his final days, he lived with music,” it said. He was first diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014.

The electronic music pioneer and multi-instrumentalist wrote the film scores for 'The Revenant', 'The Last Emperor', and 'Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence', ...

(The work won a BAFTA for Best Film Music.) It also serves as something of a high water mark for a This led to collaborations with the British artist David Sylvian (of the band Japan) and American guitar hero Adrian Belew, who worked with the bands King Crimson, Talking Heads, and also David Bowie. In 1978, Sakamoto released his first solo album, Thousand Knives, which continued to push the envelope of electronic music and new technologies, but also incorporated more of a jazz fusion element. Two tracks from the album were released as a combined single, “Firecracker,” and they even appeared on Soul Train. He studied both electronic music and ethnomusicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, which works as an early expression of his omnivorous tastes. After years as a session keyboardist, he co-founded the Yellow Magic Orchestra with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi in 1978.

Sakamoto's management team announced that he died on March 28. He had been treated for cancer in recent years.

The award-winning composer took a particularly strong anti-nuclear stance that put him at odds with Japanese officialdom.

“(Rokkasho) is hugely profitable for the general contractors. But he was also an advocate for peace and environmental issues, in particular taking a strong anti-nuclear stance that put him at odds with Japanese officialdom. They know nuclear power is unnecessary and dangerous, and that it will be dangerous for hundreds of future generations because of the radioactive waste.

Japanese composer and electronic music pioneer behind the soundtrack for the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.

With the Austrian guitarist and composer Christian Fennesz he recorded Sala Santa Cecilia (2005), Cendre (2007) and Flumina (2011). He and Byrne teamed up to record the single [Psychedelic Afternoon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUuKhMS-Aek) to aid tsunami survivors. Thomas Dolby featured on the pulsating [Field Work](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdq-Pn6xPBE) from Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia (1986), the track accompanied by an ingeniously conceived video, while for Neo Geo (1987) Sakamoto enlisted [Iggy Pop](https://www.theguardian.com/music/iggy-pop), Bill Laswell, [Bootsy Collins](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/apr/14/bootsy-collins-funkadelic-funk) and Sly Dunbar. YMO paused their activities in 1984, though the trio continued to collaborate on each other’s solo work, and they reformed to make the album Technodon (1993). He formed a group of musicians called NML (No More Landmines), which featured [Firecracker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkkFST5qrLg), from their 1978 debut album, was itself sampled in Afrika Bambaataa’s Death Mix. Born in Tokyo, Ryuichi was the only child of Keiko (nee Shimomura), a hat designer, and Kazuki Sakomoto, a literary editor. For the opening of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics he provided [El Mar Mediterrani](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4AzXwtfHck). The soundtrack, which won him a Bafta for best film music, contained the Sakamoto/Sylvian composition [Forbidden Colours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1YkHJJi-tc), a vocal version of the film’s main theme, which was a Top 20 hit in Britain. [electronica](https://www.theguardian.com/music/electronicmusic), Sakamoto was able to combine his skills as an academically trained musician with an aptitude for electronic music and an ear for countless musical styles. [Andy Partridge](https://www.theguardian.com/music/xtc) from XTC, and the electrofunk track Riot in Lagos proved inspirational for the likes of Mantronix and Afrikaa Bambaataa. He won an Academy Award (along with his fellow composers David Byrne and Cong Su) for his soundtrack to

Twitter account Tech Product Bangers has compiled Nokia 8800 ringtones and alerts – most of which the late pioneering Japanese musician created.

[A Tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto: To The Moon and Back ](https://crackmagazine.net/article/album-reviews/to-the-moon-and-back-ryuichi-sakamoto-review/)was released last November to mark the musician’s 70th birthday, featuring reworked versions of his music by artists including Thundercat, Devonté Hynes, Alva Noto and David Sylvian. In addition to his film scores, extensive solo and collaborative releases and output as one third of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto created many of the signature mobile phone ringtones and alerts for the Nokia 8800 back in 2005. Please take a listen, some lovely sounds here.”

TOKYO -- Ethnicity, the state, the era: He dismantled every barrier and continued to search for new sounds. His goal was to create the "people's music.

Takahashi, former drummer with UK-based Japanese art-proggers Sadistic Mika Band, had toured with Roxy Music and been friends with Malcolm McLaren, and was deep ...

Listened to now it sounds more futuristic and inventive than ever, from its reworking of Japanese classical music on Absolute Ego Dance to the proto-Detroit beats of Rydeen, achieved by emulating the sounds of the charging horses in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The trio have been listening to punk, new wave, hip-hop and synth-pop, and it shows in the more aggressive rhythms but also in their ironic emulation of David Sylvian’s and John Foxx’s vocals on the tracks such as Pure Jam and Stairs. Following Sakamoto and Takahashi’s collaboration with Hosono on 1978’s playfully bizarre Paraiso, the group joined up with computer programmer Hideki Matsutake to create this genre-breaker. Recorded with Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera, who Takahashi had befriended while touring in the UK with Sadistic Mika Band, this is an unabashed love letter to UK art rock and electronica. Defined by their cover of Martin Denny’s Firecracker, which reworks Western concepts of ‘Asian’ music with Takahashi’s hard R&B drum-kick and the beep and bloop of Japanese arcade games, this was exportable modern city exotica. The melodies are light, the vocals endearingly naive but the instrumental base (as featured on the reissue’s second disc) is astonishing, a blend of marimba, sho, hichiriki, and guitars with wailing no wave sax and dub rhythms. His first solo album in eight years, this quiet masterpiece was written while recovering from a 2015 diagnosis of throat cancer and was described by Sakamoto himself as “an imaginary soundtrack to an Andrei Tarkovsky film”. In many ways related to the highly recommended LPs of minimal electronica he’s recorded with German musician Alva Noto and Austrian experimental guitarist Christian Fennesz, but far more profoundly moving. Released in the wake of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s first break-up, Sakamoto’s debut film score, for Nagisa Oshima’s Japanese prisoner-of-war drama, is suitably melancholy, bittersweet and minimal, a collection of Oriental electronic tone poems sandwiched between two absolute masterpieces: the film’s main theme and its gorgeous companion piece, Forbidden Colours, sung by Japan’s David Sylvian. The sessions were fractious, complete with a drunken argument about Pearl Harbour, and the resultant album was steeped in a languorous melancholy reflecting Hosono’s disenchantment with both the Western perception of Japan and his own vision of America. The three members worked as producers, collaborators and effectively helped forge the cultural identity of ’80s Japan, before splitting off into three wildly different directions, with Sakamoto becoming one of the most sought-after soundtrack composers on the planet alongside carving out a solo career every bit as groundbreaking and influential as his old band. With over a hundred solo and band albums to chose from, Sakamoto, Hosono and Takahashi have a formidable back catalogue to chose from but here are MOJO’s pick of the ten best to start you off...

A remembrance of the legendary artist and composer, who died last week at 71.

In 2014, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and not long after wrote his late-career masterpiece async in the throes of treatment. I’d wave and he’d return the gesture and a sly grin—and then he was off, headed to the next thing. He said this like it was the natural evolution of things, that inevitably one gives up the obligation of melody and harmony for the ambiguity of texture and tone.

The Japanese composer had an exceptionally wide-ranging career: he was by turns a synth-pop idol, the composer of both sweeping film scores and quiet, gentle ...

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, he collaborated with a wide array of international musicians, including Thomas Dolby, Youssou N'Dour, Iggy Pop, Jaques Morelenbaum, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and an especially frequent partner, singer-songwriter and experimental composer David Sylvian. He also wrote the scores for Pedro Almodovar's High Heels in 1991, and Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel in 2006 and The Revenant in 2015, among others. But, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer." But I know that I want to make more music. Sakamoto also wrote the movie's score, his first. At his initial meeting with Oshima, Sakamoto told Afrika Bambaataa sampled their "Firecracker" for his "Death Mix (Part 2)." By the time Sakamoto reached university to study composition, his musical life was already following multiple paths simultaneously. YMO proved to be an enormous cultural force not just in Japan, but internationally. As a teenager, he became enamored of the work of Claude Debussy — a composer who himself had been inspired by Asian musical aesthetics, including that of Japan. Sakamoto died on March 28 after a multi-year battle with cancer, according to a statement published on his website Sunday. He began taking piano lessons when he was 6 years old, and later started writing his own music.

The world-renowned Japanese musician and actor composed for Hollywood hits such as The Last Emperor and The Revenant.

At his home in New York, he gets electricity from a company that relies on renewables, he said. She posted on her Instagram the years her father had lived – from January 17, 1952, to March 28, 2023 – and a photo of a worn out, half-broken piano. “How we make electricity is going to diversify, with fossil fuel and nuclear power declining,” Sakamoto told The Associated Press in an interview in 2012. Sakamoto also left his mark as a pacifist and environmental activist. He was first diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014. “To his final days, he lived with music,” it said.