Sakamoto, night sky
In my ears is “20220214,” from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest record, 12. The dozen songs are all dates, formatted in that most efficient and elegant way: YYYYMMDD. As final songs, rather than mere drafts or voicenotes, the dates are deliberately indexical, calling attention to their place in time, as if the music exists to stand for or surpass the days themselves. YYYYMMDD: a day at its simplest. Ready to be processed, arranged.
Sakamoto, the composer, actor, producer, and member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, one of the 20th century’s most influential bands, announced two years ago that he had been diagnosed, again, with cancer. “From now on,” he wrote, “I will be living alongside cancer. But, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer.” Last month, he streamed a concert, assembled from new live recordings of individual songs that he was too wearied to play in a continuous set. The dated tracks of 12, improvised and recorded during his treatment, could be read as a diary of illness, their numerical names mirroring the attenuation of days into dates, of living into the notching of time.
Throughout 12, Sakamoto’s breathing is audible, in short and shallow breaths that keep their own rhythm. They are too irregular and slight to be invitations for the listener to breathe along. Instead, they emphasize both his own frailty and the physical, intimate process of making music. Like the songs’ names, the breathing foregrounds the circumstance of the recordings. Taken together, they constitute a record that is a record of itself, an hourlong LP that is also a calendrical and self-reflexive testament.
The music itself, marked by all this timekeeping, is remarkably timeless. Like Lee Ufan’s album artwork, a minimalist overlay of green, red, and blue lines, Sakamoto’s music slowly moves towards its own center, revealing further color and texture. Étude and ambience, clarity and murk, impressionism and minimalism are all gracefully balanced into this late and wordless work.
I experience this balance just as the plane emerges from the weather below. The track changes from “20220214” to “20220302 - sarabande.” The rain is sucked away, and we arc over a canyon of clouds. A thick, dark valley rolling up into a ridgeline of cumulous peaks. A piano emerges, clear and Debussian, from the previous song’s cosmic synths. The whole sky swerves. Far-off planes blink along their vectors. A man in Japan slowly dies into his keyboard that I might hear him breathe in space.
The songs of 12 proceed in chronological order, from “20210310” to “20220404”—except the final one. The record ends with “20220304,” plucked from its natural order. Good endings, in art if not in life, are often a matter of rearrangement. So, after an hour of pianos and synthesizers—bells. Clinking like suzu or coins dropped carefully into hammered bowls. Metals moved as if by hands or wind.
“I have just turned 70, but how many more times will I be able to see the full moon?” wrote Sakamoto last year. It is impossible not to find 12 funerary. A spirit leaving or approaching. The final bells like an inevitable epilogue, the sound of that early morning you will never hear arrive.
ben tapeworm