Ryuichi sakamoto biography sample

Sakamoto Ryuichi built on his childhood musical ambitions after graduating from Tokyo University with excellent grades. As a child he learned to play piano and enjoyed a wide range of music. This diversity would influence his later compositions as his musical styles covers such a great number of musical genres. At university, he became especially interested in electronic music, a style with which he would be famously associated with for the rest of his career.

Sakamoto Ryuichi started his music career in 1978. In addition to releasing his solo album Thousand Knives, he also joined together with project leader, bassist/keyboardist Haruomi Hosono who recruited him along with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi as session musicians for YMO before they joined as full members of the band.

The band concept was to produce music which was inorganic and as electronically based as possible. YMO's music although produced in the late 70s and 80s is still highly influential today as samples and remixes of the bands' famous tunes are often worked into modern electronic music. The band's first album, The Yellow Magic Orchestra, was released in Japan in 1978 and because of its success, the album was remixed and released in the USA in 1979. Several of the band’s most famous singles over the next year or two, including Firecracker, Computer Game and Tong Poo, were famous in the UK and USA as well as Japan. The band produced a number of albums before announcing their breakup in 1984, although the band did reform briefly in 1993 for one last album Technodon before ceasing activities completely.

However, Sakamoto Ryuichi carried on with his career with a strong pace becoming involved in collaborations with famous musicians including David Sylvian, with whom he has worked extensively, and David Bowie, with whom he played a part in the movie "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence." Sakamoto also composed the musical score for this movie as well as

Japanese composer (1952–2023)

Ryuichi Sakamoto (Japanese: 坂本 龍一, Hepburn: Sakamoto Ryūichi, January 17, 1952 – March 28, 2023) was a Japanese composer, keyboardist, record producer and actor. He pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of the synth-based band Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his YMO bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto influenced and pioneered a number of electronic music genres.

Sakamoto began his career as a session musician, producer, and arranger while he was at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in the mid 1970s. His first major success came in 1978 as co-founder of YMO. He pursued a solo career at the same time, releasing the experimental electronic fusion album Thousand Knives in that year, and the album B-2 Unit in 1980. B-2 Unit included the track "Riot in Lagos", which was a significant contribution to the development of electro and hip hop music. He went on to produce more solo records, and collaborate with many international artists; David Sylvian, DJ Spooky, Carsten Nicolai, Youssou N'Dour, and Fennesz among them. Sakamoto composed music for the opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympic Games, and his composition "Energy Flow" (1999) was the first instrumental number-one single in Japan's Oricon charts history.

As a film score composer, Sakamoto won an Academy Award (Oscar), a BAFTA, a Grammy, and two Golden Globe Awards. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) marked his debut as both an actor and a film score composer; its main theme was adapted into the single "Forbidden Colours" which became an international hit. His most successful work as a film composer was The Last Emperor (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, making him the first Japanese composer to win an Academy Award. He continued

The last time I saw him, we were both using Windows machines and this time we both had 15" Powerbooks. I showed off TraktorDJStudio and gave my blogging spiel. Ryuichi has a cool web page and is on a blog called codeblog but I tried to convince him to dive into it himself and get the full blown blogging community experience. I walked him through the tools and my favorite sites. Ryuichi sends out emails to a list several times a week with his thoughts on the environment and war and I think that having a strong voice in the blog space would be really cool for him.

I also got to see Sora-san and Neo again. The last time I saw Neo, he was still a little kid. It made me feel old seeing him so big. ;-)

I spoke with him in 2018 ahead of the release of a short documentary about his life. For a former pop icon, whose face had appeared on many albums and magazine covers, he was pretty shy. (He liked the film, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, because it was “not too long.”) I’d set down a plastic recording device, plus my phone as backup, and he proceeded to play with both throughout the interview.

Over coffee at a sleepy restaurant in the West Village, we talked about the film, and then he expanded on his larger philosophies of music. At first, the conversation sounded, frankly, a little woo-woo for me: human beings, the natural world, the connection between the two. But as he continued, I began to understand what he meant: that relationship was one of tension. All music is artificial, he said. People craft it with material from nature. In fact, art is an abuse of nature, of sorts. The thought pained him.

And yet, he could not resist. He admits it was a contradiction. “But I do want to make my own sound, make my own music… That’s the true desire.” How else would he survive?

Sakamoto has always pursued that desire. His inexhaustible curiosity and relentless work ethic left us with a prolific output, from the internationally beloved techno pop of Yellow Magic Orchestra to the introspective experimentation of his ambient works to the playlist he made for that one restaurant in Murray Hill. Music sounds the way it does today because Sakamoto fiddled with early synthesizers.

As a film, Coda is less interested in the breadth of Sakamoto’s career, but more in the thematic weight of his philosophy about technology and naturalism. At one point in the documentary, seated in front of his Steinway grand, Sakamoto explains how the music of his piano was made possible only by the industrial revolution. A combination of wood and string and “tremendous force” to produce an instrument, a technology to create music.

“Matter taken from nature is molded by human industry, by the sum