Comments by Shiro Takatani

‘async’ is the album which Ryuichi Sakamoto described at the time of its release in 2017, as “I don’t want anyone to hear it because I love it so much”. Taking the opportunity of being offered to create the album artwork, I visited Sakamoto-san’s studio in New York for shooting, and after that, when ‘async -surround’, the 5.1 channel surround sound Blu-ray edition was released, I produced the video for it. For his ‘RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: SECCHI ONGAKU (installed music) EXHIBITION’ at the Watari-um, I created the installation for ’async-drowning’. I also took part in the video making for the concert ‘RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: async AT THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY’ in New York, Armory, and had the pleasure to be involved in many activities in various ways.

When Sakamoto-san was producing this album, he originally had the concept of ‘Secchi Ongaku (installed music)’, wanting his audiences to experience hearing the ‘sound’ placed three-dimensionally within a space. When ‘async immersion’ was exhibited for the first time at ‘AMBIENT KYOTO 2023’, we aimed to create Sakamoto-san’s ideal environment under ZAK-san’s direction, to allow visitors to experience a three-dimensional sound space using multitrack recording, tailored to suit the vast space of the venue, a former printing factory basement of the Kyoto Shimbun Building.

The visuals feature equipment from Sakamoto-san’s studio, his piano, his garden, clouds and ripples on water, landscapes from Ireland, Morocco, Tokyo and Germany, and a piano that Sakamoto-san encountered, the damaged piano by the tsunami from the Great East Japan Earthquake. Based on the concept of ‘async’ (asynchronous), the visuals and music are basically asynchronized, apart from the exception of some text segments.

Experiencing the work within the flow of the ever-changing interplay of sound and image is like watching waves or ripples in rain, an experience that, whilst repetitive, never happens in the same way twice.