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Master of electronic music: Ryuichi Sakamoto / INDEPENDENT

A prolific solo artist and composer who worked with musicians from Bowie to Madonna, Sakamoto refused to stay within the confines of one genre

INDEPENDENT's Tim Greiving writes……Ryuichi Sakamoto, an eclectic Japanese composer who was an early leader in electronic pop music and became an acclaimed writer of film scores that blended Eastern and Western cultural influences, has died age 71.

Sakamoto founded the Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978 with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, inspired by the German electronica group Kraftwerk, and it soon emerged as Japan’s top-selling band.

Popularly known as YMO, the orchestra perfected a witty robotic pop that attracted legions of teenage fans in Japan and influenced the sound of everything from Nintendo video-game scores to the techno genre and hip-hop.

YMO had dancefloor hits in the US with the funky synth tracks “Firecracker” and “Tighten Up”, which toyed with ancient Eastern musical sounds and new technology. They earned a spot on Soul Train in 1980, where they played “Tighten Up” and their popular song “Computer Game”.

Fans included Duran Duran and producer Todd Rundgren, and their song “Behind the Mask” was covered by Eric Clapton and Michael Jackson. “We were very big,” Sakamoto told The Guardian in 2008. “That’s why I hated it. We were always followed by paparazzi.”

The band broke up in 1983, and Sakamoto became a prolific solo artist, also making forays into acting.

He played a Japanese prison-camp commander opposite another musician, David Bowie, in the Second World War drama “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence” (1983). Sakamoto agreed to take the role only if he could score the movie as well, and he composed a stutter-step main theme that combined an Eastern pentatonic scale with French impressionism for a strikingly catchy result.

“I tried to make a Christmas song, because it's a Christmas film,” he explained to The Daily Telegraph in 2017. “But it's also a fantasy story – a meeting of Western and Eastern gods – so I wanted it to sound exotic to both Western and Eastern ears.”

The score, which featured synthesisers – an anachronistic touch given the film’s historical setting – earned Sakamoto a Bafta award for Best Movie Score.

Filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci hired Sakamoto to co-score his 1987 epic The Last Emperor alongside David Byrne of Talking Heads and the Chinese composer Cong Su. Sakamoto’s main theme was a 70mm-sized melody full of romance and nostalgia.

The composers shared an Academy award and a Grammy award for their soundtrack score. The film, in which Sakamoto played a Japanese officer and ally of the emperor, also collected the Best Picture Oscar.

Sakamoto reunited with Bertolucci on The Sheltering Sky (1990), starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger as a couple travelling in North Africa amid marital ennui, and again on Little Buddha (1993). Madonna cast him as a director in a music video within a music video for her 1993 song “Rain”.

But Sakamoto was far more comfortable behind the screen. He scored approximately 50 feature films, documentaries and television projects – including Wuthering Heights (1992) starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes, the 1993 miniseries Wild Palms, produced by Oliver Stone, and Snake Eyes (1998) and Femme Fatale (2002) for director Brian De Palma.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, musician and composer, born 17 January 1952, died 28 March 2023

© The Washington Post
 

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