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Inside Fukushima: What Happened After the Nuclear Disaster?

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From interview "Is that part of why you framed async as a soundtrack for a non-existent film? The idea of giving it that kind of framework, but also tying it to the visual?

I think so. Of course, I have been influenced by the images, the visuals, for a long time, but this album is probably the most that I was influenced by moving images.

When you’re soundtracking a film that doesn’t exist, what images did you use?

Well, mainly some images of Tarkovsky movies. You know, I said this album is a soundtrack for an imaginary Tarkovsky movie, but imaginary Tarkovsky movie means some images and scenes and sounds which I remember seeing from Tarkovsky movies in the past. So it is a Tarkovsky movie"

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Interview with composer about async album

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Interview with composer about async album

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async is your first major work in eight years. Was there anxiety about returning after such a long pause?
The pressure I had was that the album would be the first one in eight years, which is almost a decade. Only one album in a decade means if I live for another 10 years, there will be only one other album. That would be it! I was nervous about that.

But you know, musically or creatively, I didn't have any pressure on me. I was going to make an album in 2014, the year I was diagnosed with cancer. I canceled everything, and then two years later, I started making this album, and I decided to forget everything and dump everything I had at that point.

I wanted to start from scratch, because I was the closest to death I'd been in my life. This was an important experience, and I wanted to dig into that experience. I wasn't trying to reflect this experience onto my music, but naturally there might be some reflection of this severe experience.

Generally, I dislike the process of making music based on a blueprint or purpose or aim. If I was an architect, I would be a bad one, because I don't like having blueprints. Of course, without blueprints, nobody knows what the building will be. But that's exactly what I like to do. I shouldn't know what I'm making, or what it will be. I want to make something I don't know, and that I've never done or never known. Hopefully, for me, it's going to be a surprise, and a new experience.
Are there certain systems or techniques you go back to, or are you reinventing the way you approach music each time?
I try not to repeat what I've done in the past. I've been trying very hard to do something new each time, for years.

I studied Western music for a long time, ever since I was 10 or 11. I started taking piano lessons when I was six years old, and I also did composition techniques and the history of different styles from Baroque to contemporary music. For this album, I tried to forget everything I'd learned. I had to invent for each track, each piece, everything. But I was open to a track being something very similar to a style or a form that existed in the past. For example, a track I was making sounded like a Beethoven sonata, which is okay. I didn't want to control myself. I wanted to let the music be.
Over the years your music has gotten quieter and more spacious. Is this just how it's coming out, or is it intentional?
It has been getting less dense since maybe 2000. For composition and for performance, for playing, too. Almost 10 years ago, when I was touring, I played some concerts in London. A friend of mine, Dai Fujikura, who is a very successful contemporary composer-like Pierre Boulez loved him very much-knew almost all the music I'd made in the past. He grew up with my music. He knows it more than I do.

After the concert, we started talking, and he complained that I played much slower than the original songs or pieces. He asked, "Why?" That made me think, "Why do I want to play much slower than before?" Because I wanted to hear the resonance. I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing, then the next sound, and the next note or harmony can come. That's exactly what I want.
Has getting older changed your approach?
Well, especially after I had cancer three years ago, full concerts or a tour would be too hard for me. So no touring anymore. Not like a solo concert, one hour or two hours. This is not only because of the cancer. As I get older touring is hard, especially touring in Europe, because we usually use a bus with 14 beds, going from one country to another overnight, and that's tiring. I'm not a rock and roller, so I'm not used to it.

The other thing about getting older: Sometimes I listen back to the Yellow Magic Orchestra stuff. Sometimes I have to, when making compilation or something, and I'm very surprised that the music of YMO sounds very violent. Very wild, really. Yukihiro Takahashi 's drumming was so wild. He was very young.

At that time we thought it was a kind of cold, cool techno pop, but now it's such muscle-oriented music. I was playing very hard on the synth. It doesn't sound very hard, but it's really muscle-oriented music. Now we have less muscle strength, and I'm not interested in playing very fast. But Yukihiro, he's still very wild. We're almost the same age, but he's still very wild.

Some years ago, the other member of YMO, Haruomi Hosono, he's five years older than we are, went to Cuba to look for some musicians, and he saw a very old musician, maybe in his 80s, playing bass in a club or a bar, and his expression about this old musician was, "This old guy plays the bass like cutting tofu." You must be very gentle cutting tofu, otherwise you can damage it, break it. I love that expression, and I want to be like that. I should be like that at 80.
In 15 years.
Yes, 15 years older. So since that conversation with Hosono, I like getting older, and I'd love to see whether I can play like that, you know, like cutting tofu on the piano. This is my hope.
You were born the same year John Cage released his 4'33". Do you attach any symbolism to that? Was Cage important to you?
Very important. Since I got into high school, or around that time, I've been influenced by modern art. Around that time, I started reading the only available modern art magazine in Japan. Through this magazine, I got to know John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and Fluxus. I was very interested in mainly the New York art scene and experimental music, too, from the late 60s. I started listening to the post-John Cage generation of composers, like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, but at the same time I was kind of studying more conventional, academic music, like Messiaen, Bartok, Stravinsky and that. So I was kind of divided, and I still am. I like very experimental music. I am very interested, and I want to do something like that, but also I have a very conventional academic part inside of me.
You've been making many different kinds of music for a long time, and have gone through different projects and collaborations and phases. Do you still get creative blocks, or are you able to move through things at this point?
You know, I have doubts, but the images, like the movies, always inspire me. So when I'm empty, vacant, I start watching any movie, b-class, c-class, it's okay. B-class kung fu movies are so inspiring. The music, for kung fu movies, very old kung fu movies, not sophisticated ones, is so inspiring. They're so wild. I was watching those kung fu movies while I was making async.
Is that part of why you framed async as a soundtrack for a non-existent film? The idea of giving it that kind of framework, but also tying it to the visual?
I think so. Of course, I have been influenced by the images, the visuals, for a long time, but this album is probably the most that I was influenced by moving images.
When you're soundtracking a film that doesn't exist, what images did you use?
Well, mainly some images of Tarkovsky movies. You know, I said this album is a soundtrack for an imaginary Tarkovsky movie, but imaginary Tarkovsky movie means some images and scenes and sounds which I remember seeing from Tarkovsky movies in the past. So it is a Tarkovsky movie, in a way.
You've lived in New York for some time. Do you think living in New York versus living in Tokyo has changed the kind of music you made?
I never thought of that, but it's an interesting question. If I was living in Tokyo, would I make an album like async? I don't know. Maybe.

I have been recording sounds of New York a lot. Every time it's raining, I'm still recording the rain sound, but I'm sort of fed up of with the sounds of New York, because not so much surprises me anymore.

That's why I drove upstate. The sound environment is completely different. Even a big city like New York has a unique soundscape. Paris is a big city, but last year in June or something, July, I was walking around in Paris recording sounds. Sounds are very different. To me, recording is like fishing. You know, catching fish and then I get back home and start cooking with the fish. And that's exactly how I feel. So, in Paris I got the great fish. It made me really happy. All of a sudden I started hearing some children's voices from a building, like a school. In Japan, schools have a big yard. But in New York or Paris, they don't have a yard. Very tiny. So from the street all of a sudden I heard children singing. I don't know that I have heard children singing from the schools in New York.

I was surprised that in the Paris streets-these very small streets-there's a lot of water. Probably water that was used for cleaning and washing dishes or whatever, plates or something, maybe in the 19th century or even in the first half of the 20th century, but now it's just water coming out. No one is using it; it's just there for the pleasure of seeing it. Each one has a totally different sound, so I was enjoying and looking and recording.
What is it about water that interests you?
Water has three states, but you know, not really only three-clouds, fogs, mist, rain, and many others. A rainbow is related to water. Our bodies are 70% water, and our planet is also 70% water on the surface. We're almost like a puddle of water. As you know, those different states of water can look very beautiful, but sometimes they can be very violent, like a tsunami.
You have a project based around a piano damaged by the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. Have you completed that, or that you're still working on?
I'm still working on it. I'm going to purchase it from the school. My idea is to get the realtime earthquake data of the world, the whole world, and transform the data to MIDI signals, to play the piano. So the piano, damaged by the tsunami, is now a device to express the vibrations of our planet.
How do you decide if a project is done, and then when it is done, how do you judge whether it's a success for you or a failed project?
I guess it's by some degree of my own satisfaction. It's not numeric. For instance, I'm very proud of async, but in the 90s, I was making fake R&B, fake House music, and fake Hip-Hop music. I don't like that. I'm not happy about it. I wish I could erase that time. Making film music is different. It's for other people, not yourself. It is still my own music, but it's for other people. My solo work is entirely for myself, so it's judged by my own satisfaction and whether I have proceeded enough, if I have pushed myself to another level. That's how I judge it.

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On how your work changes as you get older

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async is your first major work in eight years. Was there anxiety about returning after such a long pause? The pressure I had was that the album would be the first one in eight years, which is almost a decade.

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yichunwang

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literally a dedicated web page with biography, so cool!

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literally a dedicated web page with biography, so cool!

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When Ryuichi Sakamoto was a high schooler in Tokyo, he had to ride a commuter train to get to class. The passengers were always crammed on, trapping one another between stray limbs and contorted torsos. Unable to move, all the teenage Sakamoto could do was listen. He amused himself by counting the sounds the train made, identifying more than 10 that he would listen out for every morning.

Close listening is a habit that has carried Sakamoto through nearly 70 years of musical exploration, each decade leading him in new directions. He was born in 1952, the year John Cage composed 4′33″. When he was a toddler, he was introduced to the piano, an instrument he would go on to examine from many Cageian angles. As the '70s bled into the '80s, he segued from an ethnomusicology and composition degree to the role of keyboardist and songwriter for Yellow Magic Orchestra, the proto-synthpop group led by Haruomi Hosono. In the solo career years that followed, Sakamoto's embrace of a new wave of electronic instruments led to fruitful experiments in fusing global genres, which in turn made way for close studies of classical impressionism. Many times over Sakamoto's sonic path has leapt forward then looped back on itself, forever telling the present something of both its past and future.

The how of composition is as important to Sakamoto as what he makes, and more often than not his creative process starts with improvisation. "You have to open your ears all the time because anything could happen unexpectedly," he has said of his approach. "Anything can be music." A wrong note could be the right way into a fresh musical idea. The sounds of a city at night might inform the architecture of a new album. In fact, it was a building that inspired , Sakamoto's 2016 live improvised composition with longtime friend Alva Noto. Specifically, Philip Johnson's modernist Glass House, which the American architect built in Connecticut in the late '40s to live in. As part of their performance, Sakamoto and Noto played Johnson's glass and steel home like an instrument, sweeping rubber mallets over its contact mic'd surfaces.

The relationship between space and sound, how the one reflects and refracts the other, is something that Sakamoto has also explored in his collaborations with visual artists. In All Star Video (1984), his digital compositions were augmented by Nam June Paik's hyperactive video art. In 1999, he premiered his multimedia opera LIFE, for which he made Shiro Takatani his visual director. Expanding on LIFE's themes of symbiosis and evolution, Sakamoto and Takatani went on to produce several ambient installations together, which combined art objects, audio, and video. In 2018, Sakamoto's various art project collaborations were brought together for the first time in Seoul, as part of a retrospective exhibition titled LIFE, LIFE.

Outside of his artistic practice, Sakamoto has written music for a wide variety of settings, including the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, a health tonic ad (which grew into "Energy Flow"), and an episode of Black Mirror (2019). However, it is his contributions to cinema for which he is most often recognised. He has scored over 30 films in as many years, including Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant, and Yoji Yamada's Nagasaki: Memories of My Son. His cinematic accolades include an Academy Award, a Grammy, a BAFTA, and two Golden Globe awards. "Working on a film is like a journey to an unknown place," Sakamoto once said . "I cannot experience that doing my own thing."

In recent years, the Sakamoto who once counted all the sounds he could hear on his train journey to school has resurfaced with renewed vigor. His 2017 album, async, paints an audio portrait of the passing of time, informed by his recovery from throat cancer. In a documentary released the same year -Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, directed by Stephen Nomura Schible - he travels to the Arctic to record the sound of melting snow. In another scene, he plays a "drowned" piano that was found in the Miyagi Prefecture during the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake-tsunami that triggered a nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. "We humans say [the piano] falls out of tune," Sakamoto says in Coda. "But that's not exactly accurate. Matter is struggling to return to a natural state."

These sonic observations are not just aesthetic; they run in parallel to Sakamoto's environmental and activism work. He is an anti-nuclear campaigner and the founder of the project, which is involved in reforestation and carbon offsetting. The veins that connect Ryuichi Sakamoto's music, art, and activism are his meditations on the ever-evolving nature of life. "Music, work, and life all have a beginning and an ending," said Sakamoto in early 2019. "What I want to make now is music freed from the constraints of time."

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When Ryuichi Sakamoto was a high schooler in Tokyo, he had to ride a commuter train to get to class. The passengers were always crammed on, trapping one another between stray limbs and contorted torsos. Unable to move, all the teenage Sakamoto could do was listen.

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1978 worked as a session musician then formed an internationally successful electro music band called Yellow Magic Orchestra
Claude Debussy was his "hero"

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His track "Riot in Lagos" was significant in the development of electro and hip hop music

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After the earthquake and tsunami that struck northeastern Japan on 11 March 2011, Ryuichi Sakamoto quickly rushed to the area to help repair musical instruments in primary and secondary schools. Musical instruments are already a part of Ryuichi Sakamoto's body; and repairing them and playing music is his way of mending and comforting people's broken bodies and minds. He saw the tsunami piano for the first time in the auditorium of a secondary school. Trying to play some notes on the spot, it still sounded, which made him say "that's tough", but it was still heartbreaking because it looked like the corpse of a dead piano that could not be repaired -" passed away, drowned".

But after his illness, Ryuichi Sakamoto was reminded again and again of this piano that he had once given a death warrant for.

Looking back at the history of the piano, it is an instrument that only after the industrial revolution and the development of technology to a certain extent man was able to make. It is indeed a great realisation of human ego that people transformed a substance that existed in nature, fixed and deformed for a long time, into a musical instrument. But what about the perspective of the piano, the life of the piano, "your time"? What does the tsunami mean for it? Could it also be one of those moments when the natural thing in herself finally has a chance to return to its original state? He then used these particular tones to produce ZURE (2017) from the Asynchronous album. "ZURE" （ずれ）means "staggered" in Japanese: illness is nothing but the staggering of health（ずれ）and async, also part of nature; and the line between illness and health is fluid.

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(This is unrelated but "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda" is a documentary about his music and life so it will be good for research...)

His musical style is electronic fusion and experimental, however since he does compositions for film scores, he has some more orchestral cinematic music too. He also was a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra who's style was part of the development of techno and synthpop music.

"But it also hearkens back to Sakamoto’s acclaimed career as a soundtrack composer, scoring Nagisa Ôshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (where he acted alongside David Bowie) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (Sakamoto won an Oscar for Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) as well as recently scoring Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. For those familiar with the arc of Sakamoto’s four-decade long career, async seems to echo aspects of it all, as if Sakamoto sought to embrace his many iterations of self. The starbursts of “stakra” go back to his earliest days as a synth whiz kid in pioneering Japanese pop act Yellow Magic Orchestra while the stark and heartbreaking “ubi” recalls the Satie-like simplicity of his most famous composition, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” the piano shot through with satellite beacon signals. Detuned strings mimic the traditional koto on “honj” and comprise the furious thrashing noise of the title track."

^ From Andy Beta's review of the album async for Pitchfork: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23118-async/

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Ambient music means many things in the present moment. Brian Eno's Reflection from earlier this year presented its contemplative side, the recent compilation Mono No Aware posits it as a commentary of modern technology, and ambient musician Keith Fullerton Whitman rhetorically wondered: "What music isn't ambient in the 21st century?" Its modern conception stems from a now-mythologized moment, when Eno was convalescing in a hospital bed after being hit by a cab, the playback on a harp record so low that it blended in with the sound of rain. It's environmental, but from its inception, ambient music also has roots as a healing music.

Ambient as restorative comes to mind with async, Ryuichi Sakamoto's sixteenth solo album. In June of 2014, the legendary Japanese composer was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent rigorous radiology treatment to combat it. Three years after that diagnosis, Sakamoto returns with an album bearing a sense of mortality surrounding its every sound. Unlike his '80s heyday where Sakamoto fearlessly embraced pop and found himself in the studio with Iggy Pop, David Byrne, or Maceo Parker, async is more closely aligned with his 21st-century experimental side and his ongoing collaborations with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Christopher Willits. But there's a warmth and fragility to the album here that makes it stand apart from these works.

A careful piano melody opens the album, with just enough space between the notes for a noisy chord to rise up and consume it all, shifting from white noise to solemn organ line, revealing both Sakamoto's penchant for melody and texture and the gap between each. The copious reverb that surrounds each restrained note on "ZURE" would slot right in with Kompakt's Pop Ambient series. In conceiving the album, the press release states that async was a soundtrack for an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film and the stately theme of "solari" does bring to mind Tarkovsky's 1972 masterwork Solaris.

But it also hearkens back to Sakamoto's acclaimed career as a soundtrack composer, scoring Nagisa Ôshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (where he acted alongside David Bowie) and Bernardo Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky (Sakamoto won an Oscar for Bertolucci's The Last Emperor) as well as recently scoring Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant. For those familiar with the arc of Sakamoto's four-decade long career, async seems to echo aspects of it all, as if Sakamoto sought to embrace his many iterations of self. The starbursts of "stakra" go back to his earliest days as a synth whiz kid in pioneering Japanese pop act Yellow Magic Orchestra while the stark and heartbreaking "ubi" recalls the Satie-like simplicity of his most famous composition, " Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, " the piano shot through with satellite beacon signals. Detuned strings mimic the traditional koto on "honj" and comprise the furious thrashing noise of the title track.

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Ambient music means many things in the present moment. Brian Eno's Reflection from earlier this year presented its contemplative side, the recent compilation Mono No Aware posits it as a commentary of modern technology, and ambient musician Keith Fullerton Whitman rhetorically wondered: "What music isn't ambient in the 21st century?"

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task2 Instrumentation and song structure:

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task2 Instrumentation and song structure:

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I can hear piano with one same single tone playing for like one minutes at first, it keeps looping. And then theres one silvery sound joining in (maybe is playing by the triangle?) to also keep playing with one single tone which is a little higher than the first piano sound. And these two sound keep looping. And then theres other two sounds join in which respectively sound like some electrical appliance is broken, and a more higher piano sound, and also with the same single tone keep looping. And then some loops slowly disappeared, with other sounds keep looping. And the song left with the electric broken voice and the triangle sound, and sometimes the piano sound keep looping with really slow speed in the end.

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recorded myself listening to the song and drew the movements. I focused on my hands and arms because that's what I was moving the most but by whole body was also swaying back and forth

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Yuxuan

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visit to the British Museum online collection (Japan)

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visit to the British Museum online collection (Japan)

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Async (2017) it's Ryuichi's 19th studio album and his first one in 8 years since he had throat cancer in 2015. Sakamoto thought async would be his last album: "That’s why I tried to forget all the rules and forms, anything. I just wanted to put down just what I wanted to hear, just a sound or music, it doesn’t matter. This could be the last time."

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visual response

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I liked making these marks because the sound the charcoal made against the paper fit in with the white-noise-y type sound in the background of the song. I might explore further the sounds that different materials make against paper :)

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Upload the outcome of your research task - label it with your name and the activity you selected. Connect it to either Primary or Secondary!

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Yinyi Li

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British Musemum + V&A - theme of tsunamis present in the music

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British Musemum + V&A - theme of tsunamis present in the music

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Post you Secondary research below

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Post your primary research below

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYE0VyEVAcU

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Ryuichi Sakamoto - "ZURE" (from "async")

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Please upload your visual research pdf here (please write your name)