Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12 album review — the sound of ongoing life

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s new album has been preceded by the news of his former bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi’s death aged 70. They were members of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the innovative synth-pop group that formed in Tokyo in 1978. Takahashi was their drummer and lead vocalist. Sakamoto, who has gone on to have a highly distinguished and prolific career as a solo musician and Oscar-winning film score composer, was their keyboardist.

Takahashi’s loss amplifies the note of mortality that runs through 12. Having recovered from cancer in the 2010s, Sakamoto revealed last year that he was at an advanced stage of another diagnosis of the disease. In December, he livestreamed a gig that he thinks might be his last. “I don’t have the energy to do live concerts,” he explained. The sound of him breathing as though engaged in strenuous activity features repeatedly in the unhurried tracks on 12, his first album of non-soundtrack solo work since 2017.

The album was released digitally on January 17, Sakamoto’s 71st birthday. Its 12 instrumentals derive from musical sketches that he made for a sound diary following his discovery in 2021 that he had cancer again. The first is “20210310”, or October 3, 2021. It is an ambient electronic soundscape with long cosmic drones and slow fades. There is no beat keeping time. That arrives in the second track “20211130” with Sakamoto’s breaths, a raspy sound that provides a rhythmic backdrop to his glacially paced piano-playing, backed by an electronic shimmer.

Sakamoto’s usual eclecticism is pared down to the barest compounds. Subtle variations catch the ear, such as the two types of breathing used as rhythmic counterpoints in “20220123”, one wheezier than the other. The use of respiration to keep time in slow-motion music that resists the passage of time through sustain, echo and repetition is mesmerising. The shallow nature of his breathing discloses Sakamoto’s illness, but it is also the sound of ongoing life. He ends with several shorter, more melodic piano pieces influenced by Claude Debussy, one of his earliest influences. Change and continuity are the twin forces at work in this fascinating album, a mode of being in the shadow of death.

★★★★☆

‘12’ is released by Milan Records