Fullmoon by Ryuichi Sakamoto
I meet many people who have never heard of musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, which I find shocking, because to me he is one of the Big Five in music: David Bowie, Lou Reed, Miles Davis, Kate Bush and Ryuichi Sakamoto. I am sure you know his music though, because he has composed many film scores, among others for The Revenant. My absolute favorite is his music for the film adaptation of Murakami’s Tony Takitani: silent, meditative yet monumental, like a work by Rothko.
This year he released the stunning async, which Sakamoto himself called a “soundtrack for an imaginary Andrei Tarkovsky film.” It is an impressive album, multifaceted, melodious, atonal, soft and loud, consoling and disturbing. I need to be in the right mind to listen to it. Sometimes, when I am not in the right mind, async gets me in the right mind. In all honesty, I think the album is about death. Sakamoto came very close to it recently, when he was diagnosed with throat cancer.
Together with filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul Sakamoto set up an async Short Film Competition, asking filmmakers to create a video around the tracks on async. So far he received 700 submissions, which can be viewed on Vimeo.
The videos are from all over the world. They are short films, collages, dance films, documentaries, spoken word, you name it. Some of them are beautiful, some of them are haunting, some of them are boring, most of them are somewhere in between. To check them all, or a selection of them, it’s best to check Sakamoto’s Twitter-timeline. You can also help your favorite video win by voting.
I will be posting a couple of them, the coming weeks. The above one is by John Miller (Jon Wayn), featuring dancer Akhir Stewart. (PB)
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