nº100 / SAKAMOTO / KAGAMI+ / OSAKA

Zoltan Alexander
2 days ago
9 min read

Following the immense success at the SHED in New York, London, and in half a dozen other countries, late Japanese musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s piano returns to Japan, to VS in Osaka, with KAGAMI+, a unique, expanded version of (MR) mixed-reality performance directed by Todd Eckert of Tin Drum.

Review by Zoltan Alexander

SAKAMOTO

KAGAMI+

THE UNSTOPPABLE JOURNEY Todd Eckert of Tin Drum knows how to surprise us

The extended version, renamed KAGAMI+ returns to Osaka (Japan), to the creative hub VS Visionary Station, designed by the world-renowned architect Tadao Ando, with a vast space of 15-meter-high concrete walls.

KAGAMI+ directed by Todd Eckert of Tinn Drum, New York, offers a unique (MR) mixed-reality performance for both longtime music lovers and those who discover Sakamoto’s music for the first time.

KAGAMI+ is an immersive solo performance that was born through a collaboration between Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and Todd Eckert during the last four years of Sakamoto’s life. The initial KAGAMI was first performed in 2023 in New York, at The SHED.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/67b9d9_ecc79443404f4be4be0105756f4a50f1/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

VIDEO / Sakamoto - KAGAMI (London) directed by Todd Eckert of Tin Drum / Video © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

THE MASTER

One hopes that there isn’t anyone who has never listened to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music before or is not familiar with his name. We have all seen David Bowie in Merry Christmas Mr Laurence (1983), directed by Nagisa Ôshima, with Bowie, Tom Conti, and Ryuichi Sakamoto himself. He also composed the haunting title song Forbidden Colours that won him an Oscar, a Grammy, a BAFTA, and two Golden Globe Awards.

The film ultimately marked his debut as both an actor and a film-score composer, most prominently of The Last Emperor (1987), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, making him the first Japanese composer to win an Academy Award. Following his success, he continued composing nearly 45 original film scores for directors including Bernardo Bertolucci, Pedro Almodóvar, Brian De Palma, and for films such as The Sheltering Sky (1990), Little Buddha (1993), and The Revenant (2015).

PHOTOS / Ryuichi Sakamoto during the exhibition of KAGAMI (London) / Photos © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

In 1978, with band members Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, the trio formed the immensely successful international electronic music band (YMO), the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

For over four and a half decades, Sakamoto influenced several electronic music styles. He also worked as a solo artist, producing solo records, collaborating with many international musicians, including David Sylvian, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop, and Youssou N'Dour. Sakamoto's long-awaited opera LIFE was released in 1999. This ambitious multi-genre multi-media project featured contributions from Pina Bausch, Bernardo Bertolucci, José Carreras, and the Dalai Lama.

Following the nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plants in Japan, Sakamoto became a strong voice and an iconic figure in Japan's social movement against nuclear power and in support of the victims of the earthquake and tsunami disasters. As he returned to music following his cancer diagnosis, his haunting awareness of life crises led to a new documentary masterpiece, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA, shot over five years and released in 2018.

THE INSTIGATOR / Ryuichi Sakamoto / KAGAMI / Todd Eckert / Tin Drum / photo Zoltan Alexander

PHOTOS / Ryuichi Sakamoto during the exhibition of KAGAMI (London) / Photos © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

For his contributions to music, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.

On 21 January 2021, he wrote: "From now on, I will be living alongside cancer, but I am hoping to make music for a little while longer."

PHOTO / Sakamoto - KAGAMI (London) directed by Todd Eckert of Tin Drum / Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

KAGAMI / THE PERFORMANCE

In London, the journey started with the unusual test. An ophthalmology test.

Upon arrival, experts meticulously examine prescription glasses and provide the guests with appropriate VR-optical-headsets. Before the performance starts, guests are ushered through a tunnel of lights, white fabrics, and large-scale photographic images from Sakamoto’s life. On one of the walls, they project Coda, a documentary filmed in 2017, of Sakamoto collecting sounds in various locations. Sounds of rainwater in a bucket, sampling ice in the Arctic Circle, lowering the microphone to a small stream, and whispering to the camera: “I’m fishing for sound”.

It was an everlasting curiosity that governed Sakamoto to hunt for sounds throughout his life. “Anything can be music,” he said. “You have to open your ears all the time because anything could happen unexpectedly.”

Following the tour, guests are guided into an under-lit circular theatre and seated in a single row facing an empty space. There is nothing, no sets, no screens, no live-performers. Just an empty theatre that goes dark, and Sakamoto appears in the centre, sitting at a Yamaha concert piano. The virtual likeness of the musician materialises in the venue through the unique (MR) mixed-reality capture.

His presence is shocking. After the first notes, people stand up and begin to approach the resurrected, virtual maestro. The audience is particularly encouraged by the production to freely wander around the space; a behaviour that wouldn’t be tolerated in any traditional circumstances. We lost him not a long time ago, and yet there he is again. He starts playing, and the audience cannot take their eyes off his hands.

PHOTO / Sakamoto - KAGAMI (Osaka) directed by Todd Eckert of Tin Drum / Photo © Courtesy of Tin Drum

We slowly lose gravity and float in space, in a magical, dream-like virtual world that Todd Eckert very cleverly created for us. The digital effects are spectacular, and for each song, striking visual images are created. The scenography happens on many real and virtual levels, and as one world is juxtaposed on another, we lose our point of reference, our sensation of knowing where we actually are, or where we need to turn, or what is real, what is not.

With the next song, it starts virtually snowing. People reach out for the snowflake-orbs to catch them before they hit the floor. Behind, 360º large-scale, black & white images appear as a carousel of postcards of New York, slowly transitioning into snowy mountains for the next song. We turn around and around, to admire the scenes, whilst the music goes deep under our skin.

PHOTO / Sakamoto - KAGAMI (London) directed by Todd Eckert of Tin Drum / Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

Tin Drum’s production under Todd Eckert’s direction created a unique, well-contrived, and beautifully executed installation, paying homage to the late musician. Eckert knows how to be humble. He understands proportion, composition, rhythm, and how to mix visual elements to create the perfect illusion or perfect reality. No matter how much technology he uses, he never forgets that the focus is always on Sakamoto and his music.

But how was it achieved?

Eckert used a unique process of 48 cameras to capture a solo piano performance traversing Sakamoto’s decades-long career. The recording took over three days and created a horrendous amount of data that needed five months to process. Eckert introduced a technology that had never been seen before, mixing Sakamoto’s dimensional virtual performance with the real world by using cinematographic (MR) mixed-reality, a view of the real-physical world with an overlay of digital elements, where physical and digital sequences interacted. He also managed through the personalised (MR) lenses of the headset to block out the neighbouring spectators, who were occasionally passing in front of us. With the headset, they became invisible; we could vaguely see their feet to avoid a collision, whilst Sakamoto and his piano stayed in absolute focus.

“I’m fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound, one that won’t dissipate over time. Essentially, the opposite of a piano, because the notes never fade. I suppose in literary terms, it would be like a metaphor for eternity.” Ryuichi Sakamoto

Sakamoto gave a ground-breaking performance, playing 10 original compositions including Energy Flow and the world-famous Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, along with some rarely-played pieces, The Seed and The Sower and the last song BB, dedicated to filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci.

PHOTO / Sakamoto - KAGAMI (Osaka) poster / Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander

During the filming, in January 2023, Sakamoto reflected on KAGAMI:

“KAGAMI translates to “mirror” in Japanese.

In reality, there is a virtual me.

This virtual me will not age and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries.

Will there be humans then?

Will the squids that will conquer the earth after humanity listen to me?

What will pianos be to them?

What about music?

Will there be empathy there?

Empathy that spans hundreds of thousands of years.

Ah, but the batteries won't last that long.”　

THE TALK

Zoltan Alexander of THE INSTIGATOR was talking to Todd Eckert of Tin Drum, New York, about the production, and they recalled some memories with the musician.

Todd Eckert’s creativity goes back years. He was first published as a music journalist at the age of 14 and became an editor of Only Music magazine at 17. He produced the award-winning feature film Control about Ian Curtis, the lead singer in Joy Division, and in 2012, he joined the technology group Magic Leap, before leaving for Tin Drum in 2016.

Tin Drum is the world’s premier studio producing content for mixed-reality devices, a collective of artists, engineers, designers, and technologists blending dimensional forms with the real world to create unique experiences that are impossible through other media.

Eckert also directed Marina Abramovic in The Life, which premiered in 2019, as the world’s first mixed-reality, large-scale public performance.

Zoltan Alexander of THE INSTIGATOR

Have you met Sakamoto before filming together in Tokyo?

TEDD ECKERT

Ryuichi and I met several times over the years from the 90’s on. He was a great composer, producer, artist, an environmental activist, a friend, and a wonderful person to work with.

THE INSTIGATOR

KAGAMI began production in 2019. Who initiated the project?

TODD ECKERT

KAGAMI is a project I conceived indeed in 2019, but its foundation was laid when Bowie and Prince died within a few months of each other in 2016. In different ways, both artists had singular identities in performance, which could only be properly understood in the entirety of a physical presentation. Flat media gave you a sense of what happened, but not how it actually felt. Ryuichi had such a relationship with the piano, and was probably the sole, most important artist in the development of my artistic sensibility. I just had to find a way to represent the real him for future generations.

It was in December 2020 when we made plans to travel from New York to Tokyo to capture a specifically selected, career-spanning solo piano performance traversing his decades-long career. The recording took several days and created a horrendous amount of data that we needed to process. By any measure, that was a huge undertaking.

THE INSTIGATOR

What was Sakamoto’s first reaction to your ideas?

TODD ECKERT

Ryuichi was both practical and curious. If something could expand his massive understanding of sound, he was usually “game”. We spent an afternoon at my apartment in New York talking about what this idea might represent to his legacy.

THE INSTIGATOR

How was the first morning of the filming?

TODD ECKERT

He was somebody who had no interest in talking about the things that he did to make him famous, but he could sit around and talk about a sound in a glass that you picked up somewhere. He’ll talk about that all day long. And the filming? We worked non-stop, but I remember, when Ryuichi had visited his oncologist in Tokyo, he learnt that his cancer had returned with a vengeance … and so, all of the gravity of life, of his career, you could feel in every note.

THE INSTIGATOR

Sakamoto and his piano. There is a lot to say.

TODD ECKERT

I don’t think there was ever so complete a relationship as that between Ryuichi Sakamoto and his piano. It all began through his relentless curiosity; it resulted in decades of redefining what sound can mean. Electronics and sonics and all manner of compositional elevation formed a body of work elementally human and monumental in both breadth and scale. But in the end, it all came back to his relationship with those 88 keys, and KAGAMI is just that. I hope that our audience will feel the connection as profoundly as we did when we were making it.

When five months after the filming, the data came back, Eckert was devastated; the images were all distorted, and he had to find a way for a correction. There was, after all, no possibility of re-recording what had been an extraordinary and profoundly emotional performance. The result after weeks of heavy editing, KAGAMI was reborn with a new kind of (MR) mixed-reality concert that absorbs the audience in an environment, combining the performance with the physical world.

THE INSTIGATOR

Was KAGAMI Sakamoto’s last recording?

TODD ECKERT

While I understand the attraction to the drama of finality, we worked for so many years together that rendering it a memorial in any way wouldn’t be fair to the intention of the work - and truly, it wasn’t his last performance. We shot KAGAMI over three days, but he would also go to shoot Opus with his son Neo directing it. The result was gorgeous, but a completely different project. The point of KAGAMI is not its finality, but the energy in the performance itself.

Sakamoto’s unstoppable energy and enormous heart went silent in March 2023, at 71.