The Japanese pianist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto died in March after, in his words, “living alongside cancer” for several years. Two months before he passed away he released an album called 12, his 12th solo studio recording, a collection of minimalist etudes poignantly accompanied by the sound of his own occasionally laboured breathing.
Sakamoto once said that the “piano symbolises interiority”. This startlingly intimate record marked the end of a decades-long career exploring the spaces between distant poles of genre and sound, from trailblazing technopop in the late 1970s with the Yellow Magic Orchestra, to his 1978 debut solo album Thousand Knives, mixing modern synths with classical piano, to brushes with funk, afrobeat and hip-hop on 1980’s B-2 Unit to his Oscar, BAFTA, Grammy and Golden Globe award-winning scores for films like The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, The Revenant and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, in which he starred opposite David Bowie.
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Sakamoto grew up listening to contemporary pop and rock’n’roll. He cited The Beatles and The Rolling Stones as influences alongside Bach, Stockhausen and Debussy, whom he once called “the door to all 20th-century music”. His cultural curiosity was also piqued during his teenage years by Andy Warhol and New York’s avant garde, and his own music came to straddle a similar line between pop and esotericism. Since the 1970s his influence has quietly begun to show up in jazz and classical hip-hop, film scores and in the contemporary charts; everyone from the Ragga Twins to Jennifer Lopez, Burial to Beastie Boys have sampled Sakamoto, with artists as disparate as Massive Attack, Questlove and Johnny Marr acknowledging his impact on their work.
The latest seed of Sakamoto’s influence to germinate comes from Asynchrone, a collective of Parisian musicians with backgrounds in free jazz and electro, formed in 2021 specifically to explore and honour his music.
Far from a staid, deferential tribute, the band’s declared purpose is to continue a conversation that Sakamoto started, using his back catalogue as a bedrock for improvisation and experimentation. The group comprises award-winning electronic musician and producer Frédéric Soulard (also a member of the French post-rock group Limousine and Franco-Scottish duo Maestro), cellist Clément Petit – who has previously worked with Romane, Ben l’Oncle Soul and Blick Bassy among others – along with clarinet and saxophone player Hugues Mayot, flautist Delphine Joussein, pianist Manuel Peskine and Vincent Taeger on drums.
