The 63-year-old musician’s output has since consisted of just one album, a live collaboration with Illuha and Taylor Deupree, recorded the year before his hiatus. Last summer, Sakamoto announced that he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer, and would be taking some time away to prioritize treatment.
The Japan-only compilation Year Book 2005–2014, collecting rare and unreleased commissioned work, comes at a difficult time for its maker. Sakamoto’s great strength throughout his massive oeuvre is his search for new vantage points. And 2002’s Century of Reform is itself a set of hypotheses testing the versatility of a single theme. Lawrence", the iconic centerpiece of his soundtrack for the David Bowie vehicle of the same name, has been re-worked repeatedly, including a bit-crushed reduction during recent live performances with German sound sculptor Alva Noto. A song like "Energy Flow" might find its first spark of life as a brief commercial jingle, then expand into Japan’s first-ever instrumental chart-topper, then find its way into a modern classical form. Sakamoto has released more than a half-dozen studio albums of reconfigured material, making his discography less a straight line than a phylogenetic tree. Though it’s been decades since the trailblazing techno-pop of solo albums like Thousand Knives and B–2 Unit, he’s continually revisited pieces from throughout his career, including his time in the seminal electronic trio Yellow Magic Orchestra. Ryuichi Sakamoto isn’t afraid to look back.
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