Responsible for some of the most familiar sounds of the 1980s, composer Ryuichi Sakamoto cornered the market in electro-pop mood music – at least the corner not inhabited by Vangelis around the same time. He was, though, an icon of Japanese contemporary music whose soundworlds easily crossed borders to make him a composer with a worldwide following. Though he had emerged in his own right in the late 1970s, his star was truly ignited through his concurrent work with the Yellow Magic Orchestra – the chart-topping Japanese electro-disco-pop trio (Sakamoto, Yukihiro Takahashi, Haruomi Hosono) with a penchant for English lyrics.
Born in Tokyo, Sakamoto took to the piano as a child and went on to develop a passion for electronic music. That, coupled with a talent for melody, was a winning combination, especially when it came to film scoring. His breakout work for the cinema was for the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which he also acted alongside David Bowie. His iconic main theme went on to become something of a calling card, and the score won him the BAFTA for original music. He won an Oscar for his 1988 score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic The Last Emperor and found himself in demand by some of cinema’s finest auteur directors – including Brian de Palma, Oliver Stone and Pedro Almodóvar.
Film and television has occupied him ever since, though it was just one part of what was an eclectic career in music. A serial collaborator, Sakamoto worked with many high-profile musicians throughout his career, from Laurie Anderson to Iggy Pop, and continued to record as a solo artist. He contributed music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, wrote an opera (1999's Document Life) and was a passionate environmental activist and campaigner.
Notable recent works include the BAFTA-nominated score for Alejandro González Iñáritu’s The Revenant (2016), a 2019 episode of Black Mirror, the score for the film Minamata (2020) and the 2022 anime seriesException. Just this year he released 12 (reviewed in our April issue), a series of piano works composed across 12 difficult days during lockdown in early 2022.
We name the best Ryuichi Sakamoto recordings here.
(Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP) (Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)
