Do you ever wonder what it might be like to do something you love for the very last time? And to know that it's your last time?
I saw Ryuichi Sakamoto's swan song Opus at a local theater recently. Shot on an empty stage in stark black and white, the 71 year-old composer performed his final mortal concert while dying of colorectal cancer.
It was moving, as understatements go, watching someone play their own wake. A self-requiem for a tiny audience that included his son and a few other close friends. It was hard not to get choked up.
If you're not familiar, Ryuichi Sakamoto was a prolific songwriter and composer whose career began in the late 70s with the quirky Japanese pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra.
They were, as they say, big in Japan. The biggest in Japan. In their heyday, they worked with Talking Heads, David Bowie, Aztec Camera, and Eye from the Boredoms, pioneering a proto-electronic sound that laid the groundwork for early techno and hiphop.
After YMO, RS followed up with an array of acclaimed experimental solo albums and award-winning scores for Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, The Revenant, and The Last Emperor, a career echo of a Mark Mothersbaugh/Danny Elfman/Clint Mansell thing starting in the silly world of pop and ending in film.
I came to know of him from working with minimalist composer and Sakamoto collaborator Taylor Deupree on my City Water material, and for a long time his music was my "at work" soundtrack turned down in the background to help me concentrate. There was always something magical in his late style, like being lost in a Miyazaki forest or sitting by a fire in a far-off cabin while it rains. Hot tea and all that.
In Opus, he seemed to start where he began. Alone at a piano playing his last notes on the instrument on which he'd played his first. I could see the emotional content of the songs write itself across his face while he played, the way listening to parts of my own songs will always make me think of when and where I was and what I was thinking about when I wrote them.
Over half a dozen room mics captured every quiet drip of lastness and the profound silences between movements and phrases. The Japanese ma - a pause that gives form to the whole. I heard his wedding day. The death of parents and the birth of a son. Cherry blossoms in Shibuya, and maybe a far-off cabin in the rain.
Halfway through, he messes up and starts again, determined to play through cancer's fatigue. The director, his son Neo Sora, could have shot a retake but instead chose to include it in a masterful capture of a performance not perfect. But neither is life, and Opus is nothing if not a celebration of the fact.
Let's start again, he says in the film's only bit of audible speech, and picks up where he left off. Perhaps a hidden lesson there, too.
Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away on March 28, 2023, six months after filming.
ご冥福をお祈りします
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What I’m reading: Heliophobia (Christopher Ryan)
What I'm listening to: 12 - Ryuichi Sakamoto
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