Tag: Ryuichi Sakamoto

Life, Life

‘life and death and memories’

‘There have been exceptional times when making music hasn’t been possible,’ reflected Ryuichi Sakamoto in a 2018 interview. ‘Right after 9/11, for example, I couldn’t make any music for a month. The same happened after the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, in 2011. And, obviously, when I got cancer, too. Otherwise, yeah, every single day I listen to music, think about music, play the piano and the synthesiser and I get through cups and cups of coffee.’

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Bamboo Music

A common language in music

1982 started out with Japan on hiatus. Their Visions of China tour came to an end with a show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on 27 December 1981, the dates having been overshadowed – at least off-stage – by tensions between band members, in particular between David Sylvian and Mick Karn. ‘Everyone has started on individual projects and Japan doesn’t exist for the next four or five months while we get on with other work,’ Sylvian told an interviewer the following March. ‘So most of what I do and what I think about revolves around what I’m going to do on my own…Steve [Jansen] and Mick [Karn] are doing session work at the moment. They’re performing with some Japanese artists who have come to England to record and Mick’s then going to do a solo single and I think Steve is too.’

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Snow Borne Sorrow – Gone from the Landscape

‘a glorious piece of composition’

The final chapter of David Sylvian’s second volumesample of lyrics and poetry, Trophies II, contains a selection of compositions conceived as poems rather than words to be sung to music. The final piece is entitled ‘Gone from the Landscape’, and I remember how it pulled me up short when I read it for the first time. This was, after all, a volume published early in 1999 and containing the lyrics to Dead Bees on a Cake, undoubtedly some of the most joyful Sylvian has ever penned. Of course, the darkness is always lurking close to the surface, but here at the end of the book a shadow is cast heavy:

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All of My Mother’s Names (Summers with Amma)

‘spellbound…hanging by a fine gold thread’

Ingrid Chavez’s 2010 album, A Flutter and Some Words, marked a return to music after a long break. Her only previous solo album, May 19, 1992 on Prince’s Paisley Park label had been released nearly twenty years earlier. The intervening years had been spent prioritising motherhood following her marriage to David Sylvian and the birth of their two daughters.

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The Devil’s Own

‘underlying tension, doubt, nervousness’

Gone to Earth was released in September 1986, well over two years after David Sylvian’s debut solo LP, Brilliant Trees. Customary press interviews coincided with the release of the double album and were published in September and October that year. A few months later, I was scanning the magazine racks in WH Smith at a London railway station, hungry for news of my favourite musicians, and I remember my surprise at spotting a photograph of Sylvian on the cover of Sound on Sound magazine. Sure enough, within the pages of the March 1987 edition was to be found a new interview with Sylvian undertaken by respected music journalist, Mark Prendergast.

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