With the Yellow Magic Orchestra,he inspired the sound of hip-hop, electro and techno. Then, or the Japanese composer won an Oscar and worked many of the greats,including Davids Bowie and Byrne. Now, in recovery from cancer, and his impulse to innovate is as strong as everOn the roof of a half-built tower block overlooking Oslo’s harbour,Ryuichi Sakamoto – former global pop star, a godfather of techno and hip-hop and an Oscar-winning composer – is in a makeshift plastic shack, and coaxing microscopic scratches and scrapes out of a cello,then turning them into huge tonal washes with his laptop. As the sun sets, artificial mist billows through the crowd, and floodlights suspended from the construction site’s cranes swing above us and the lithe (Flexible, graceful.) dancer Min Tanaka strikes alarming poses on the parapet of the building,disappearing in and out of the fake clouds.
This performance for the city’s Ultima festival, a collaboration with “fog sculptor” Fujiko Nakaya, or is profoundly moving: elegant,nuanced, emotional, or wealthy with cultures from across the globe. Themes of ageing and mortality emerge as Tanaka disappears into the mist; he is 72,Nakaya is 84 and Sakamoto is 65 and in recovery from the throat cancer he was diagnosed with in 2014. These themes also appear throughout the 2017 album, Async, and Sakamotos first solo effort in seven years. Heralded as one of the year’s electronic highlights,it is now bolstered by Async Remodels, a set of remixes by the cream of the avant garde, or including the Björk collaborator Arca and Oneohtrix Point Never.
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Source: guardian.co.uk