siteSakamoto - A Ryuichi Sakamoto Web Site

Award-winning composer and musician Ryuichi Sakamoto has made a career of crossing musical and technological boundaries. Sakamoto has experimented with, and excelled in, many different musical styles, making a name for himself in popular, orchestral and film music. A founding member of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), Sakamoto has composed original scores for 19 major and independent films, including: Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Last Emperor, and most recently, SILK. Sakamoto was awarded both the Academy Award and Grammy for The Last Emperor score.

In 2005, Sakamoto managed to simultaneously return to his electropop roots and maintain his classical influences with a fusion of many musical styles on his solo project, Chasm. Chasm was re-interpreted by fourteen of electronic music's top artists on the release Bricolages. In 2006, Sakamoto continued his collaboration with alva noto with the second European Tour and the first Asian Tour in support of their releases vrioon, insen, and revep.

Sakamoto revisited his partnership with Christian Fennesz with the 2007 release of their debut full-length album, Cendre. In October, the first release from Sakamoto’s collaboration with Christopher Willits, Ocean Fire, under the group name Willits + Sakamoto was released. On November 16th, Sakamoto premiered utp_, a new collaboration with Carsten Nicolai, commissioned by the city of Mannheim, Germany for the celebration of their 400th anniversary.

In 2007 Sakamoto premiered LIFE - fluid, invisible, inaudible..., a collaboration with Shiro Takatani, a core member of the Kyoto-based internationally active art group dumb type, with installations at YCAM in Yamaguchi Japan and the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo. While the genesis of this piece is in Sakamoto’s opera LIFE (first performed in 1999, and for which Takatani created the video aspects), as is evident in the title's "fluid, invisible, inaudible ...," it revisits the resources of sound and vision in LIFE now, several years later, in this new millennium, for an entirely new deconstruction and evolution of the work.

Sakamoto recently reunited with Yellow Magic Orchestra for one performance at Al Gore’s Live Earth festival on 7/7/07 in Kyoto, a performance which Rolling Stone magazine called the best reunion of the global festival. The group got back together for a performance at the Massive Attack-curated Meltdown on June 15, 2008.

Sakamoto is socially active, raising awareness about issues including the environment and anti-war efforts through projects including: Life, Zero Landmine, which raised millions of dollars for landmine removal, and stop-rokkasho, an evolving music and art project aimed at bringing attention to the dangers of a nuclear reprocessing plant which opened in Japan.