Ryuichi Sakamoto in Berlin: Cosmic Beliefs

A forest landscape with fir trees and deciduous trees, moss on the ground and wafts of mist in the air. On the right on the 18 meter long split screen, streaky rays run which record the vertical light and color spectrum of the forest and display them in stripes moving horizontally across the image until they are scanned pixel by pixel and disappear. The French phrase “encore la pleine lune se lever?” (Is the full moon rising again?) flickers milky-white over a stripe.

Anyone who thinks that Antoine Saint-Exupéry is about to fly past on a loop will be proven wrong by the subtle piano music, shredded with barbs and glitches from an EMS synthesizer, coming from the speakers of the monumental 14-channel sound system. What seems meditatively reserved is at the same time stunning by the sheer abundance of technology and media staging: “seeing sound, hearing time” is the name of the immersive exhibition in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, which honors the diverse artistic work of the Japanese pop star, film composer and actor Ryuichi Sakamoto for the first time ever with a show in a European museum.

“async – immersion” is just one of five large, room-filling installations in the Riekhallen. Nothing is left to chance in the design of the exhibition. Photos, films, music and found objects are absorbed into the black of the walls; the floor is also completely black and polished so polished that it glitters like the reflective water surface of a lake, creating a romantic forest ambience in 3D.

Transferring music, rhythm and sound into images, as the exhibition title suggests, not only takes on a formal synesthetic level from one direction. Sakamoto was also interested in making natural events such as the 2011 tsunami audible. As a young man in the late 1960s, he studied music at the Tokyo Conservatory, at a time when the Japanese student movement was distancing itself from the USA in the wake of the Vietnam War and was focusing on environmental issues. Unlike the anti-IMP faction among the students, Sakamoto remained committed to radical pacifism and, even as a star, dedicated his commitment to the peaceful fight against nuclear power.

The very first installation, “IS YOUR TIME,” places a school piano that was damaged in the 2011 tsunami in the middle of the room; it stands in a pool of water and under a video screen that lets snowflakes fall onto the piano from above. Its keys are operated by an automatic metal attachment, fed by real-time seismological data from earthquake activity around the world, playing music damaged by nature.

“Hearing Time” is to be understood as a signal: recognize signs of the times, pause, let go. Sakamoto's understanding of art is based on a deep cosmic conviction that our wandering souls are constantly changing in the flow of time. Sakamato remained technology and gear savvy for a long time. When electronics became more and more of a control instrument in the wake of digitalization towards the end of the 1990s, he turned to more basic themes, depicting flowing water as a source of life, which sometimes took on esoteric features.

Visitors can immerse themselves in “Seeing Sound” like a time tunnel. Sakamoto's Zen-like staging of the space-time continuum blocks out the gloomy present for a while. In view of the reactionary socio-political upheavals in Germany, this may provide much-needed peace and strength.

The seemingly mild light of Ambient is deceptive; Ryuichi Sakamoto's career was more contradictory and with more points of friction than the sometimes banal musical surface reveals. The multidisciplinary artist, who died in 2023 after a long illness, was a master of deception. As part of the technopop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978–1984), Sakamoto encountered exotic Western attributions of the Far East playfully and with absurd humor. "Firecracker", the first YMO hit, was a cover version of a US easy listening classic by Martin Denny, composed in 1959, when Exotica fever was at its peak in the US.

Through the reverse appropriation, YMO sharpened the “cute” impression of the music on the one hand and, on the other hand, arranged the song in a disco-friendly way for the Western dance floor. At concerts, the three YMO musicians initially wore Mao suits, although their productions always remained sympathetic to the state of the art of electronic sound production.

Sakamoto worked on new musical (art) projects until shortly before his death. Parallel to the start of the exhibition, the album “12 Conversations” with 17 unreleased tracks that the Japanese artist recorded together with Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) during his lifetime will also be released. Sakamoto's piano sculptures and the often microtonal electronic interludes by the Berlin artist Nicolai are constructed between elegiacally flickering and enigmatically disturbing, between ambient and impressionism that skids past the kitsch of neoclassicalism. In the middle of it all, the singer Emma Maeda raises her voice and declaims Rainer-Maria Rilke's prose “Ur-Geräusch”, the story of a teacher who has a gramophone built in class, in a very delicate voice.

A similar collaboration between Nicolai and Sakamoto, “Endo Exo,” can be found in the Berlin exhibition. Images of stuffed birds and amphibians are faded in to the sounds of Sakamoto's piano. One is reminded of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who distinguished the aesthetic sensuality of the present from the art of the past and found both dimensions enriching together. History resonates in Sakamoto's artworks, but it does not obscure the view.

“Running to the river” is the Chinese euphemism for the act of dying. Sakamoto, who made no secret about his serious cancer, took his own transience as an opportunity to create art for eternity, but in his typically thoughtful way.

"Ryuichi Sakamoto. Seeing Sound, Hearing Time", Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, until June 20, 2027, catalog 20 euros

Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto: “12 Conversations” (Noton)