Sakamoto, the Oscar-winning composer who invented Japanese Electro Music.
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Ryūichi Sakamoto was a gentle Samurai who contaminated two worlds - Eastern and Western - with his music, while maintaining a proverbial discretion and humility, typical of the Japanese people.

Musician, composer and experimenter, he passed away on 23 March ’23 at the age of 71. With him goes one of the most significant musical personalities of the last decades.

Ryūichi Sakamoto was a man without creative restraints.

When, with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi he founded the YMOYellow Magic Orchestra – in 1978, the music world was mesmerised by the cold, mechanical sounds of Kraftwerk.
Sakamoto loved that dark, hypnotic genre, but he wanted to mix it with melody in a lighter, cheerful way. If in Germany the Computer was ‘dominating’ man, making him almost a ‘machine’ (or Man-Machine), in his country of birth, Japan, 8Bit video games – with their colourful and playful aesthetics – were making their way into Japanese society, brightening the days of adults and children alike.

Ryūichi began experimenting with the various sonic possibilities that the Synth could produce, which almost unknowingly resulted in an unprecedented genre of light-hearted and colourful sounds, perfect for accompanying the bouncy and cheerful characters in video games, but not only.

YMO’s first Album: “Solid State Survivor” – 1979

He laid the solid foundations for the birth of Japanese electronic music, which has declined over the years into dozens of sub-genres: from Synth Pop to Techno, through to House, New Wave and New Romantic.

The Soundtrack and the Oscar win.

After having placed his flag at the top of musical experimentation, Sakamoto began to explore the world of film soundtracks.

In 1983, he co-wrote ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence’ with David Sylvian Furyo, where he starred alongside David Bowie, while in 1987 he won an Oscar for the soundtrack to ‘The Last Emperor’, a 1987 film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

This victory was followed by the one composed for ‘The Sheltering Sky’, also by Bertolucci, in 1990 and for ‘Spiked Heels’, a 1991 film by Pedro Almodóvar.

His vast discography usually includes more than seventy different titles in as many musical genres, such as j-pop, electronic music, ambient, bossa nova, jazz, world music and even neo-classical, with a curiosity and dedication typical of the greats, combined with an almost scientific, philosophical rigour, which has imprinted his work in the history of music, forever.

A gentle Samurai who contaminated two worlds – Eastern and Western – with his music, while maintaining a proverbial discretion and humility, typical of the Japanese people.

With his favorite Hippocratic aphorism ‘Ars longa, vita Brevis‘ – life is short, art is long – his staff wanted to inform the world of his departure, paying homage to his unique, incomparable, eternal legacy.


Rest in Genius, Ryūichi.

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