Ephemerally Permanent: "Does nothing live on?"

Eulogy for my fave

“I was aware of that theme of mortality in my music since around 2009. The decaying and the disappearance of the piano sound is very much symbolic of life and mortality. It's not sad. I just meditate about it” — Ryuichi Sakamoto

A small cathedral in the early 2000s. Inside the hall, my class rehearsed for a few days for a play we were to put on at the end of that week. Most of the children, including myself, wore white bed sheets and tinsel accessories draping across our shoulders or heads. It was truly makeshift. Our music teacher was a young woman in her early thirties who enjoyed exposing us to pop culture of the previous two decades or so, things we were too young for thematically, such as Rocky Horror Picture Show. The play, which resembled more a vanguard ritual than anything, opened with Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Tong Poo” and closed with the Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Sylvian collaboration “Forbidden Colours”. I’ve still no idea how she got away with it at a Christian school. “Tong Poo” has every essence of an Eastern revolutionary song, while “Forbidden Colours” reminds one furtively of the homoerotic motifs in Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983).

Sakamoto, despite all the genius he had and the recognition he deserves, would stand out to me mostly as a version of a man I wasn’t used to at that age. His character, Captain Yonoi, in the Oshima film he also composed the soundtrack for, is severe and poignantly beautiful to look at, full of reverence and a particular complexity; a disciplined army officer bearing a stifled vulnerability while in charge of a military camp. Many years ago, directly after a watch of this film, I spent an evening looking at his many albums covers on Google Images, particularly for Thousand Knives, the Sakamoto album that is in my rotation every single week to this day.

After rehearsing for the play I returned to a home full of dog fur in every crevice and a small black-and-white tiled kitchenette. I gushed to my family about the songs chosen for the play and would begin to listen to Ryuichi Sakamotos’s discography constantly, in my bedroom. As I got older, I engrossed myself in the genuine bond he and David Sylvian seemed to have.

One of the videos I still play almost every evening is the below BBC live taping of Japan’s “Ghosts” from the album Tin Drum. Sakamoto joins and stands to the right of Sylvian, on the synthesizer.

For a long time, I was troubled by thoughts of wandering and felt like a wisp of a cloud being tossed about by the wind. The impermanent nature of music is offset by its ability to foster a connection between the artist and the listener, producing a sense of experience that endures beyond the material.

In “Forbidden Colours” Sylvian sings:

“Does nothing live on?”

It rings true, to me, as an answer, that Ryuichi Sakamoto lives on in death as one of the better examples of permanence in all that is considered transient, or ephemeral. To many of us.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, January 17, 1952 - March 28, 2023.