Ryuichi Sakamoto’s first solo album after a cancer diagnosis is a haunted, spacious meditation on mortality and impermanence. Field recordings, processed piano, and a Bach chorale played backwards become a private language. Not easy listening, but essential for anyone who believes music can hold silence.
The first thing you hear on async is not sound but space. On “andata,” a sampled Bach chorale wanders in reverse, each melodic line stripped of its resolution. Sakamoto once said he wanted the album to feel like “swimming in the water.” By the second track, you realize the water is dark and cold.
This is an album made by a man who thought he was dying. In 2014, Sakamoto was diagnosed with throat cancer. When he returned to the studio in 2015, he had a new understanding of silence. The field recordings here—rain, footsteps, a creaking door, a heartbeat—are not decorative. They are the real instruments. The piano is often just another object in the room.
Sakamoto recorded most of async alone in his New York apartment, using a small mobile rig and whatever microphones he could carry. The engineer, Tomohiko Gondo, later recalled that Sakamoto wanted no isolation booths, no separation. He wanted the room to bleed in. You can hear it in the way the low end blooms on “Zure”—a resonant frequency that could be a bass synth or a subway train passing two blocks away.
There are guests, but they are used sparingly. David Sylvian reads Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem “Life, Life” over a bed of bowed piano and white noise. Simon Shaheen’s violin on “andata” sounds less like a performance than a ghost passing through the room. And the soprano Yuri Tanaka appears on “Garden” for just a few seconds, her voice treated until it resembles a bird trapped in a concrete stairwell.
What makes async so unnerving is its refusal to comfort. The track “ff” is built from a single distorted note that decays for three minutes. “Stakra” sounds like someone trying to tune a shortwave radio in a thunderstorm. This is not ambient music to sleep to. It is ambient music to wake up to, wide-eyed and alone.
Sakamoto described the album as “a collection of sketches.” That undersells it. The sketches cohere into a portrait of a man learning to live with uncertainty. The album’s title comes from the concept of asynchronous communication—signals sent and received at different times. That is what death is: a signal that the sender cannot acknowledge.
The last track, “fullmoon,” layers voices reading the screenplay from The Sheltering Sky: “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.” The voices arrive in different languages, overlapping, never syncing. By the time the track fades, the silence that follows feels earned. You sit with it. That is the point.
What inspired Ryuichi Sakamoto to make async after his cancer diagnosis?
Sakamoto said he wanted to create something that captured the strange, asynchronous nature of time he experienced during treatment. He described it as a response to mortality — not morbid, but deeply aware of impermanence. The album’s title directly references that disconnection between internal experience and external reality.
Is async an ambient album or something else?
It draws from ambient, but it’s far more dissonant and textural. Sakamoto called it 'sketches' — short pieces that don’t develop in predictable ways. There are no soothing pads or predictable drones. It sits closer to the work of composers like Eliane Radigue or Morton Feldman than to Brian Eno’s ambient records.
What is the significance of the reversed Bach chorale on 'andata'?
Sakamoto took a recording of Bach’s chorale 'Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ' (I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ) and reversed it, then slowed it to a crawl. The title 'andata' means 'departure' in Italian. The piece becomes a prayer moving backwards — the supplicant retreating from the divine rather than approaching it.
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