A film of a concert during which Ryuichi Sakamoto performs compositions from his album async in New York.
Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of Japan’s greatest composers, an Oscar and BAFTA-winning musician and actor (in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence he shared the screen with David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano), a pioneer of Japanese electronic music, and the composer of music for a number of films (including Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, Oliver Stone's Wild Palms, and The Revenant by Alejandro Iñárritu).
Following the release of his documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, shot over a period of five years, Stephen Nomura Schible produced the film Ryuichi Sakamoto: async Live at the Park Avenue Armory, in which Sakamoto performs compositions from the album he recorded after beating the throat cancer that was diagnosed in 2014 and which had forced him to take a break from his work. Works comprising piano and synth music mixed with the sounds of nature and city noise are performed in an intimate space to a small audience. Heterogenous sounds create harmony rather than chaos in music inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom the album is dedicated.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: async Live at the Park Avenue Armory
Director: Stephen Nomura Schible
Japan, USA, 2017. 65’ 6+