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In the immediate wake of this trendsetting electro-pop project, Thousand Knives demonstrated that Sakamoto’s solo efforts contained just as many thrilling electronic arrangements and instances of melodic grandeur as his proper band. YMO made the most of their synergy as a trio, combining Sakamoto’s stately synth leads with Haruomi Hosono’s post-funk basslines and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi’s steady grooves – all planted against a baroque web of electronic backdrops programmed to life by a team of technicians including the renowned Hideki Matsutake. When Sakamoto released his first proper solo album Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto in 1978, he was riding high on the international acclaim of his group Yellow Magic Orchestra’s self-titled debut, which landed the year before. With that in mind, let’s take a look at only a tiny subsection of the most revelatory moments from his solo career – a catalog that floats alongside his prolific output with Yellow Magic Orchestra and a wide host of collaborations. We seek to give him his flowers while he’s still here, instead of having to memorialize him after the moment when he crosses over. In an era in which so many of the iconoclasts of 20th-century music in the 60- to 80-year range have sadly passed, we must take this opportunity to honor the life and career of Ryuichi Sakamoto while he is still with us. But, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer.” Remembering that he had already struggled through a potentially life-threatening cancer treatment before,we diehard fans maintain hope that the king will once again emerge victorious in this new round of tribulations. In a typically eloquent statement released to the public, Sakamoto let us know that “From now on, I will be living alongside cancer.
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When the news reached us last week that Sakamoto (who recently turned 69) had been diagnosed with bowel cancer, the music community reeled at the idea that one of their champions would have to begin another fight to survive. However, Sakamoto overcame that round of cancer and continued to make vital music, while keeping his ears trained on the electronic music quasi-underground, even commissioning artists such as Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, and S U R V I V E to record remixes of his 2017 album Async. Here stood a man who had already achieved a state of immortality through the prescient and influential electro-pop catalog of his trio Yellow Magic Orchestra (along with fellow icons Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi) and the bottomless wellspring of brilliance contained in his solo recordings – and yet the threat of his own body deteriorating shifted the grim knowledge of mortality back into his personal universe.
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When Ryuichi Sakamoto, the electronic music pioneer and esteemed elder statesman of the Japanese and international music scenes, was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, it felt like a crippling blow to the canon of living legends that walk, perform, and dine among us.