He composed unforgettable film music, tirelessly pioneered digital sounds and campaigned fervently for the environment: the abundant artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, adored in his native Japan, died of cancer on March 28 at the age of 71.
“ He lived with the music until the very end “, said his team in a press release published on its official site, adding that the artist had wished a discreet funeral reserved for his family circle. Ryuichi Sakamoto had revealed in early 2021 to suffer from colorectal cancer, after having been treated for throat cancer since 2014.
The general international public discovered him with his film scores, starting with that of Furyo by Nagisa Oshima (1983), a subversive film about a prison camp in Asia during the Second World War, where Ryuichi Sakamoto also shines as an actor alongside David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano.
In 1988, he won the Oscar for best film music for having co-written that of the Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolucci, who collaborated with him several times, notably on his next film, A tea in the Sahara (1990). Ryuichi Sakamoto had also worked for Brian de Palma and Pedro Almodovar, and more recently wrote the soundtrack for the Revenant by Alejandro González Iñárritu (2015).
Collaborations with Cesária Évora and Youssou N’Dour
Born in Tokyo on January 17, 1952, he discovered the piano at a very young age. As a teenager, the rock of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones fascinated him just as much as Bach and Haydn, before falling madly in love with Debussy. While studying ethnomusicology and composition, which in Japan earned him the respectful nickname of “ teacher “, he began to perform on stage in the bubbling Tokyo of the 1970s. In 1978, he co-founded the group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), whose supercharged electro-pop would later have a huge influence on techno. , hip-hop and J-pop, and inspired the synthesized melodies of early video games. YMO’s success will be phenomenal in Japan.
After the dissolution of YMO at the end of 1983, Ryuichi Sakamoto multiplies the collaborations with avant-garde artists, but also with stars like the punk Iggy Pop, the Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evorathe Brazilian Caetano Veloso or the Senegalese Youssou N’Dour.
A long-time environmental activist, he became a leading figure in the anti-nuclear movement in Japan after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. In this capacity, he notably organized in 2012 a mega-concert against nuclear power near Tokyo, by ironically inviting his friends from Kraftwerk (which means power station in German), and one of the flagship titles of which is called Radioactivity. In 2007, he also founded More Trees, an NGO for sustainable forest management in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia.
(With AFP)