Exposition
When Ryuichi Sakamoto released async in 2017, it was his first full-length solo album in eight years. He also believed it would be his last. In the summer of 2014, Sakamoto was diagnosed with throat cancer. After years of struggling to produce solo work, he had finally begun writing a new album that year. Everything had to be put on hold with his diagnosis.
One year later, Sakamoto released a statement detailing that he had recovered from his cancer. In his statement, he said, “Right now I’m good. I feel better. Much, much better. I feel energy inside, but you never know. The cancer might come back in three years, five years, maybe 10 years.”
In April of 2016, he began working on async. He scrapped the ideas he had begun sketching in 2014 to begin anew, to create something fresh. In a 2017 interview for Criterion, Sakamoto reflected, “For a long time, I felt like a painter looking at a big blank canvas and not knowing how to paint.” Finally, he made the first brush stroke.
async is a collection of music composed by a man reflecting on his close encounter with death. Sakamoto stared into that great abyss and witnessed its wonder, its vastness, perhaps, even, its beauty. A glimpse into eternity. He was, of course, shaken to the core. Yet, a reckoning with death is also inextricably tied with a contemplation of life. When one is faced with the possibility of death in the near future, when the noise of daily life, the anxieties, the mundane, fall away, what are the most compelling, essential, and beautiful parts of life?
In the liner notes, Sakamoto reflects, “In making async, my first solo album in 8 years, I made the ‘sounds/music’ that I wanted to hear. What kind of ‘sounds/music’ do I want to listen to?” In this regard, async is Sakamoto’s love letter to life. It is the stripping away of everything non-essential. It is a special kind of focus unlike any other. A sense of urgency paired with the desire for indulgence. The almost desperate need to record and piece together all the sounds that evoke joy or melancholy or pain. The sounds/music that evoke deep feeling.
async begins with the only piece that Sakamoto retained from before his diagnosis. “andata” opens with a solitary piano. It is a melancholic funeral march. I listen to it and I think about death and I think about you. An atmospheric fog flows in and an organ takes over the melody. I imagine the fog filling the space around me. Holding me. I imagine a space somewhere between life and death. A meeting place. I find you. I have so much to say: things I didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t say then. Questions left unasked. I am desperate to hear your voice again.
Development
As I listen to async again and again, different images appear before me. On “tri,” a metallic chime is struck. I observe the sound decay. A pause. Then another chime. The cadence picks up. A climax is reached. Then it fades. It reminded me of something. There is a tree near your grave. Someone hung a wind chime from its branches. Whenever a breeze blows, it rings out beautifully, following the rhythm of the wind. I listen closely because it feels like you are trying to tell me something.
I spoke to you, but I realized I was only speaking to myself. You were no longer there, were no longer here. Sometimes the sun is shining and it is you. Sometimes it rains and it is also you. I am trying to find a way to write around death. To say, but not speak. To not utter it loudly, but whisper it with grace. To hold and try to understand. The abruptness. The finality.
Question: Mother, are you scared?
Answer: It’s hard. I get scared. Sometimes I wish I could just go to the ocean and sit there. To hear the waves crash against the beach. To see the clouds pass overhead, turning my face towards the sun. To sit with you and enjoy the quiet of the day. To find my happy place. I know it will bring me peace.
Q: Mother, do you miss them? Do you miss your brother and your father?
A: Yes, I do. We still had lots to do. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wish I could go back and hold them and just tell them that I love them and that it was okay to just be. I cry when I’m by myself.
Q: How do you locate grief in the body?
A: Breathe light into the body. Alternating nostril. Breathe in. Breathe out. Sit still, still enough to notice the aches. Sit with this pain in silence. Give it the time and attention it needs. Breathe and visualize the safe place.
Q: I listen to “ubi” and it feels so familiar. It opens with a bell. It rings out consistently. It reminds me of the sound of a heart monitor, a sound I detested because it reminded me of your mortality. And yet, it was a sound I so desperately needed to keep pinging. Then Sakamoto’s melancholy piano enters. I recall a Chopin prelude I played in a piano recital. I read your journal and it says that when you had your radiation chemotherapy, you listened to recordings of my piano playing. Mother, did it bring you peace?
A: It did. It helped me endure. Your playing was always so beautiful.
Q: When you are gone, where will you go?
A: No need for a date: I was, I am, and I will be. I live on in your memories. I am the hummingbird that greets you in our backyard. I am the sunshine. I live on in you.
Q: Sometimes you would ask with a smile, “Do we look related?” Now, I look in the mirror and ask myself the same question. I investigate my face, taking stock of my nose, my mouth, my eyes, my dimples. When I smile, letting my eyes squint, I think I look like you. But I am not sure.
A: We look related. You have my smile. A beautiful smile. My happy boy.
Q: Does it ever get easier?
A: I try to live day to day. I have good days and bad. On bad days, I would take you to visit them at the cemetery. We’d bring Cap’n Crunch and Cheez-Its. We’d bring flowers. Sometimes you just need to sit in the grass in silence. Sometimes you just need a quiet place to cry.
Q: Mother, how do you heal?
A: Here is a passage from Deepak Chopra’s Quantam Healing that reflects on how I am healing myself:
Every person is an infinite being, unlimited by time and space. To reach beyond the physical body, we extend the influence of intelligence. As you sit in your chair, every thought you are thinking creates a wave in the unified field. It ripples through all the layers of ego, intellect, mind, sense, and matter, spreading out in wider and wider circles. You are like a light radiating not photons but consciousness.
Q: Mother, why can’t I stop crying?
A:
Recapitulation
How do we memorialize a person? In Coda, a 2018 documentary film that follows Sakamoto through his battle with cancer and the making of async, Sakamoto muses, “I’m fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound: one that won’t dissipate over time.” He calls it a metaphor for eternity. Whereas the string of a piano will always inevitably cease to vibrate, the atmospheric fog we first hear on “andata” does not dissipate. This fog eventually finds its way back to us at the end of async on “garden.” But while the fog on “andata” feels somber, even ominous, it resolves itself on “garden,” finding peace and beauty in the eternal.
Sakamoto found this perpetual sound, this sense of the eternal, in this fog, a way to let his sound and his presence live on. If, as Deepak Chopra says, every person is an infinite being, unlimited by time and space, then I am trying to find you here. In this fog. I am trying to build you a home. A place for you to live on. A place to hear your voice again. Your laugh. A place to witness your smile. Here. Now.
Sometimes to remember directly is too painful. I think I understand now what you meant when you saw a hummingbird and said, “There’s grandpa,” or when we had beautiful weather and you said it was because of your brother. We want to remember. We never want to forget. And so we seek those we’ve lost in the everyday. We see sunlight and we say it is our loved one shining down on us. We eat Cheez-Its and we recall how it was their favorite snack.
Death, in that regard, is an unfolding of the self. It is merging with the universe. It is freedom. The ability to be anywhere, to be everywhere. It is the persistence. It is the simple and resounding fact that devotion is forever. That love is forever.
I do not intend to celebrate death. But I am trying to find strength. I am trying to find a way. I am reaching. It is a tricky thing. To both try to face and yet not face fully. To speak sideways. To speak around. To speak in code. To speak in poetry.
What I really mean when I say you are sunshine is that you are eternal. The way stars were once suns. The way they continue to shine on for so long even after their death. The way they reach so many and reach so far. What I really mean is that I miss you.
At the end of the liner notes for async, Sakamoto reflects, “There is no ‘correct’ way to make music like async. So, the answer to my initial impulse is 100% arbitrary. It is similar to climbing a pathless mountain without a map. Once you get over one peak, another one looms above, and there is no end in sight.” So, I keep climbing. With a heavy heart, I look ahead. In this fog, I keep writing. I keep searching. Searching for you. Searching for the sun.
For more information on async, you can visit Milan Records’ website at the link below. The album can be purchased in physical formats (CD, vinyl, and blu-ray) secondhand on Discogs and can be found on most streaming platforms for your listening convenience.
Active Listening 