Renowned Japanese composer and producer Ryuichi Sakamoto, widely acclaimed for his experiments with electronic music, has died at the age of 71. As a soloist and member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), he has won awards including Oscars, Grammys, and Baftas. .
Sakamoto was diagnosed with cancer for the second time in 2021. His office said he died on Tuesday. In 1983 he starred in the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence alongside David Bowie.
In 1987, his score for The Last Emperor won him an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Golden Globe. He also starred in an epic film about the life of Puyi, China’s last emperor. Sakamoto began studying composition at age 10, inspired by the Beatles and Debussy.
He formed YMO with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi in 1978, playing keyboards and his synthesizer innovations influencing techno-pop and hip-hop. «Asian music influenced Debussy a lot, and Debussy influenced me a lot. So the music spread all over the world and turned around,” he said in 2010.
Outside of his film work, Sakamoto maintains an extensive personal catalog that includes collaborations with the likes of David Byrne, Iggy Pope, and Brian Wilson. In recent years, his work has begun to directly reflect and confront his medical prognosis, especially in relation to Asynchronous 2017. In December 2022, Sakamoto performed at a live event to launch his 20th album 12 and shared, “Perhaps the last see me act like that.”
In 2016, under the theme “Anything Can Be Music,” Sakamoto performed “Glass,” an impromptu performance with musician Alvanotto, using Philip Johnson’s modernist architectural marvel, the Glass House, as a tangible instrument. His 2017 documentary Coda combined his passion for environmental activism with musical experimentation, and the composer filmed in the melting ice in the Arctic. He also founded the More Trees project dedicated to reforestation and carbon offsetting.
In 2022, Sakamoto declared that he was committed to “making music in the last moment of my life, like Bach and Debussy that I love.” Earlier in 2019, he shared, “Music, work, and life have beginnings and endings. What I want to do now is music free from time constraints.”
