Whilst adventurous music can often have a polarizing effect, the emails and feedback St John Sessions received following Ryuichi Sakamoto and Taylor Deupree’s performance at St John at Hackney church in February 2014 were amusingly pronounced. For some Sakamoto’s unconventional engagement with the piano was a sublime exercise in subtlety, texture and atmosphere, and for others a supposed “non-event”- alarming in its absence of the Satie-like melodies that are commonly expected of him. Such reactions are hardly surprising given Sakamoto’s expansive fan-base, accumulated through a vast discography and a 40-year career, which has covered innumerable styles and sought to actively defy genre-specifics. Here is a musician who is also an actor, soundtrack composer, producer environmental activist, model, a prolific collaborator and who could release back-to-back albums of surreal, easy-listening inflected pop music next to a dissonant orchestral lament on famine. His musical and career boundaries are decidedly on a map of his own making. Growing up amidst the post-war Westernization of Japan, Sakamoto’s first musical loves were The Beatles, alongside Bach and Chopin. It was whilst studying at Tokyo’s University of Art that he became versed in the avant-garde and free improvisation, and also discovered the music of Claude Debussy, which has proved to be an enduring influence on his piano playing. So from an education in the conventional and non-conventional, a love of pop, rock and exotic sounds, the foundations of this vast discography were set.
In celebration of the LP release of his and Taylor’s performance at St John’s, the list below serves to explore some key works from the start of his career up to the present, and join some of the dots of a rich and multi-faceted body of work. Opening with a vocoded rendition of a Mao Zedong poem, before launching into a drum programmed synth panoply with guitar shred in tow, and all named after Henri Michaux’s description of the mescaline experience – Thousand Knives was quite a way to kick off a solo recording debut. Informed by his diverse musical education and considerable experience within the developing age of Moog, Buchla and ARP synthesizers, the seeds of Sakamoto’s genre-blurring craft can be found in this one. Playful yet shying away from the atonal and questing to find new forms of expression through technology, this record would also impact his future production approach with the records of the recently formed Yellow Magic Orchestra. Sakamoto’s prowess on the piano also makes its first appearance amongst the electronics on Grasshoppers.
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