Ryuichi Sakamoto: async

Async is an emotional journey of the legendary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto coming to terms with death. Throat cancer sadly took his life six years later but this album deeply conveys the lived experience of knowing that time is precious.

The impermanence of life is best represented in the albums spoken word poetry. Life, Life, recites a poem by Andrei Tarkovsky's father Arseny Tarkovsky spoken by life-long collaborator David Sylvian. When describing the album, Sylvian summed it up nicely as “a work that sings of mortality and expresses a love and gratitude for life, accompanied by the knowledge of its fragility". The label Milan described Async as the soundtrack for an imaginary movie by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Fullmoon begins with a quote from Paul Bowles reading his novel The Sheltering Sky over a sine wave. "Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless."

The heavy use of church organ also coveys the emotional setting of funeral music, especially on Andata, Zure, Stakra and Solari, which I consider to be one of Sakamoto's most sad, touching and timeless songs to date. So much modern music lacks emotion or purpose but here we see a lifelong musician who reached a point in his musical journey where he can so effortlessly convey feelings and emotions with the sound of one note or frequency.