Ryuichi Sakamoto

Born in Tokyo in 1952 and died in 2023, Ryuichi Sakamoto traversed nearly five decades of music by linking electronic, ambient, minimalism, piano writing and orchestral composition. Trained at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he studied composition and ethnomusicology, he began as an arranger and studio musician before co-founding Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, a decisive trio in the rise of synth-pop and Japanese electronic music. In parallel, Sakamoto early developed a solo body of work marked by experimentation, from Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto (1978) to B-2 Unit (1980), then by a growing taste for hybrids between pop, avant-garde music, digital textures and acoustic piano. His career also extended to cinema, with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in 1983, then The Last Emperor in 1987, before scores for The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, The Revenant or Monster. Over the decades, Sakamoto collaborated with David Sylvian, Alva Noto, Fennesz, Youssou N’Dour or Jaques Morelenbaum, and evolved his language toward sparser pieces like BTTB (1999), async (2017) and 12 (2023), where silence, resonance, melody and work on the sound material intersect.