async is the nineteenth solo studio album of Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and his first one in eight years since Out of Noise (2009). It is also his first full-length solo record since recovering from throat cancer in 2015. Consisting of a combination of unusual interpretations of familiar musical instruments, textures both acoustic and electronically made, samples of recordings of people such as David Sylvian and Paul Bowles doing readings, and everyday sounds borrowed from field recordings of city streets, async has underlying themes of the worries of the end of life and the interaction of differing viewpoints in humanity.
Promoted with two art museum installations, a short film contest, and premiering via a listening event at Big Ears Festival, async was first released in Japan by Sakamoto's label Commmons in March 2017 before Milan distributed it to other nations in April 2017. It was critically acclaimed, landed in the top twenty of the Japanese albums chart and in the top five of Billboard's American Top Classical Albums chart, and was ranked the best album of 2017 by Fact magazine. A set of remixes of songs from async, titled ASYNC – REMODELS, was released in December 2017.
Background Since 2009, Ryuichi Sakamoto had an eight-year period where he was unable to inspire himself in his composition process. As a result, he focused most of his time on scoring films instead of producing solo material. He started sketching ideas for a solo album in 2014, but they were scrapped after he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, after which he had to pause his career entirely.Hadfield, James (April 26, 2017). "Ryuichi Sakamoto resists the prettier path on ‘async’ and comes out stronger". The Japan Times. Retrieved March 31, 2018. Despite recovering from the disease in August 2015,"Ryuichi Sakamoto returns to work following throat cancer treatment". Fact. August 3, 2015. Retrieved March 31, 2018. Sakamoto thought async would be his last album: "That’s why I tried to forget all the rules and forms, anything. I just wanted to put down just what I wanted to hear, just a sound or music, it doesn’t matter. This could be the last time."Beta, Andy (June 12, 2017). "Ryuichi Sakamoto interview". Andy Beta Official Website. . Retrieved March 31, 2018. He began making it entirely from scratch in April 2016, which was after completing his soundtrack for the film Rage (2016),Saxelby, Ruth (July 20, 2016). "Ryuichi Sakamoto Debuts “Raindrops” From His Score For Nagasaki: Memories Of My Son". The Fader. Retrieved March 30, 2018. and finished it in eight months. The only track made before Sakamoto's cancer diagnosis that appears on async is "andata."
Sounds and underlying themes Inspired by the minimal structures of the works of Claude Debussy and the free jazz compositions of John Coltrane,Przybyslawski, Corinne (April 28, 2017). "Ryuichi Sakamoto Survived Cancer and an Earthquake to Make His Most Personal Album to Date". Thump. Retrieved March 31, 2018. async, as Milan Records summarized, is a set of representations of Sakamoto's thinking that "plays with ideas of a-synchronism, prime numbers, chaos, quantum physics and the blurred lines of life and artificiality/noise and music.""Ryuichi Sakamoto – async". Milan Records Official Website. Retrieved March 30, 2018. Sakamoto conceived the album as the soundtrack for a nonexistent movie by Andrei Tarkovsky, whose works mostly deal with mortality (see the Worries of death subsection of this article)Smith, Karl (April 27, 2017). "Karl Smith On Ryuichi Sakamoto's async". The Quietus. Retrieved March 31, 2018. and employed walking scenes with the type of Foley featured on async.
When making async, "I just wanted to hear sounds of things, everyday things, even the sounds of instruments, musical instruments as things," Sakamoto said. Sakamoto cited the works of sound art sculptor Harry Bertoia as a major influence when making the album. The instrumentation includes both regular orchestral instruments and unusual acoustic and programmed textures, more specifically bizarre interpretations of otherwise familiar instruments and the "musical aspect[s]" of everyday noise. async employs a variety of sound-producing techniques, such as field recordings, making mist textures out of chorales, and wailing sounds from glass.Weston, Hillary (June 1, 2017). "Sonic Memories: A Conversation with Ryuichi Sakamoto". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved March 31, 2018. Some of the tracks include out-of-tune pianos; he recorded two Steinway pianos he had in his home studio, and a piano that was drowned in tsunami water was used on the track "Zure."Yeung, Vivian (March 28, 2018). "The piano used on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async gets its own documentary release". Crack Magazine. Retrieved March 31, 2018. He thought it was "nature" that was responsible for the notes the broken pianos played: "the piano is a very systematically, industrially-designed thing, but they were a part of nature, taken from nature. Mankind artificially tuned and set the well-tempered scale, but the thing is if you leave the piano for a long time without a tuning, it will be out of tune."
"Tri" is an unedited recording of triangles performed by three musicians:Saxelby, Ruth (May 5, 2017). "Ryuichi Sakamoto Is Listening Closer Than Ever". The Fader. Retrieved March 30, 2018. Ian Antonio, Levy Lorenzo, and Ross Karre. In a 2017 conversation with Sakamoto, Ruth Saxelby assumed the triangle sounds that were in the later part of the track were digitally programmed. However, Sakamoto corrected Saxelby by saying "Tri" went through more than ten takes because the three musicians were "perfectionists" and thus wanted the triangles to sound machine-like.
Asynchronization and human duality As Sakamoto described the album's main idea, Sakamoto said it was human nature most people "find pleasure in being in sync. That's why I wanted to create untraditional music that doesn't synchronize[, because it's like] speaking in a language that doesn't exist.""Ryuichi Sakamoto: Music for a Divided World" (4:21–4:59). Close-up Gendai Plus. April 22, 2017. Retrieved March 30, 2018. He wanted to make a record like this for a long time, but it was difficult to do because he "wanted to make something async but still musical."
According to Sakamoto, his musical interests were moving towards "sound and music" rather than just "music" while producing the album, and thus he incorporated field recordings to capture "lots of strange sounds." Sakamoto did the field recordings by walking through streets in New York City, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Paris with a cell phone microphone in his hand,Close-up Gendai Plus (5:17–5:30). activity that made up for four months of the album's production. The sounds he captured were those all people unavoidably encounter in everyday life, such as street noise, animal sounds, leaves, water, and rain.Close-up Gendai Plus (5:12–6:25). Composing the score for The Revenant (2015), a film very heavy on themes about nature in both its story and music, influenced how Sakamoto produced async.Coultate, Aaron (May 3, 2017). "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Everyday objects". Resident Advisor. Retrieved April 1, 2018. For "Walker," Sakamoto spent around ten to fifteen minutes recording his footsteps while walking in a forest filled with leaves, which makes up most of the track. It was a forest that surrounded Philip Johnson's Glass House, which Sakamoto later used to record the improvisational piece "Glass" with Alva Noto.Beta, Andy (February 16, 2018). "Alva Noto / Ryuichi Sakamoto: Glass Album Review". Pitchfork. Retrieved April 5, 2018.
On async, all of its sounds come together but never create a proper harmony.Close-up Gendai Plus (5:43–5:54). However, Sakamoto described these sounds as "significant in their own wayClose-up Gendai Plus (6:11–6:13). because their "existence has meaning."Close-up Gendai Plus (6:22–6:25). He explained, "As human beings, we [...] take the liberty to decide which sound is good or bad. [...] I'm suggesting we open our ears and listen to each sound without prejudice."Close-up Gendai Plus (6:27–6:41). Sakamoto did this to symbolize as well as commentate on how the differing viewpoints of humanity worked:Close-up Gendai Plus (23:55–24:01). "In this world of myriad viewpoints and unlimited information, every single person is choosing only the information that he or she is interested in, and people with similar interests gather and form a group. Then, groups with similar interests exchange views with one another, accelerating the movement to narrow the conversation down to ever-more specific views bound by a particular concern. And so, groups with different interests barely communicate with each other, or even if they do, they tend to dismiss the views of the other."Close-up Gendai Plus (12:52–13:40). The message of async is that, like dissonant sounds coming together to create music, humans of all different viewpoints should come together and respect each other.Close-up Gendai Plus (24:01–24:09).
This theme of async was compared by writer Karl Smith to the works of Shane Carruth, whose films also deal with chaos in human nature. He used "Zure"'s mixture of "intangible synthetic panes with the more earthly, percussive tones of the piano" and "Walker"'s combination of noises with a "call and response [of] gentle swells and vibrations" as examples of the record's use of juxtapositions, which present "the idea that any one thing is more than just that one thing." While a majority of async consists of subdued pieces, the album also contains more dissonant tracks like "Tri," "disintegration," which places awkwardly-tuned piano plucks aside warm synthesizer pads, and the title track, which includes harshly plucked pizzicato strings. This is to symbolize a "never ending pendulum swing between solace and chaos," Paste magazine stated.
Worries of death Some critics noted Sakamoto's worries about death seeping into the album, which were influenced not only by his experience with cancer but also the many earthquakes and tsunamis that occurred in Japan in 2011. He said in an interview, "We were warned about how our civilization is fragile and how the force of nature is great." David Sylvian, who reads a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky on the song "Life, Life" over pizzicato strings, synthesizers, and a shō, said async "expresses a love and gratitude for life accompanied by the knowledge of its fragility." On "Life, Life," Sylvian reads, "To one side from ourselves, to one side from the world / Wave follows wave to break on the shore, / On each wave is a star, a person, a bird, / Dreams, reality, death - on wave after wave." The recording was done in 2011 and was one of ten poem readings Sylvian submitted to Sakamoto for a charity concert supporting victims of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
"Fullmoon" begins with a quote from Paul Bowles reading his novel The Sheltering Sky (1949) over a sine wave:Beaudoin, Sean (June 18, 2017). "Life, Life: async and the Legacy of Ryuichi Sakamoto". Lotus Land. Retrieved March 31, 2018. "We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really."Beta, Andy (April 21, 2017). "With Cancer in the Past, Ryuichi Sakamoto Returns to His Calling". The New York Times. Retrieved March 30, 2018. He also says on the song, "Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless." The later part of the song depicts Bowles' quote being spoken in other languages by Sakamoto's friends over an instrumental of piano and synthesizers.