Ryuichi Sakamoto isn’t afraid to look back. 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. Sakamoto has released more than a half-dozen studio albums of reconfigured material, making his discography less a straight line than a phylogenetic tree. 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. "Merry Christmas Mr. 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. And 2002’s Century of Reform is itself a set of hypotheses testing the versatility of a single theme. Sakamoto’s great strength throughout his massive oeuvre is his search for new vantage points.
The Japan-only compilation Year Book 2005–2014, collecting rare and unreleased commissioned work, comes at a difficult time for its maker. Last summer, Sakamoto announced that he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer, and would be taking some time away to prioritize treatment. 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. The past decade has seen Sakamoto’s once panoramic focus narrow to the minute particulars of just a few genres: His collaborative albums with the likes of Noto, Deupree, Fennesz, and Christopher Willits each have their idiosyncrasies, but all deal mostly in cold drones and ambience, while his solo efforts have been mostly focused on piano. Thanks to the wide variety of contexts its 30 pieces were written to serve, Year Book winds up being the most representative—and rewarding—Sakamoto album of its titular period.
The opening invocation, "Cantus Omnibus Unus", is a severe Gregorian chant that stakes out new territory for the composer. The brief piece sets the tone for the first disc’s bleak minimalism, where fragments of Debussy keys shimmer gently along a barren digital landscape between pockets of warmth and harmony. These works demonstrate an intuitive grasp of the sounds Sakamoto has continued exploring with his Western collaborators of late, while the fragmentary "Visionaire" reminds that these are gestures he discovered for himself on 2002’s spectral Derrida soundtrack.
Breaking from its predecessor’s sustained tone, the second disc bounds in all directions. "2099" is a digitized take on free jazz textures, while a 2011 remix of Meredith Monk’s "Astronaut Anthem" repurposes the original’s tension to create a drowsy sense of bliss. Two pieces from Sakamoto’s collaborations with Fennesz wind up here: "Ropa", whose comforting romanticism is more akin to Leyland Kirby than anything off Cendre or Flumina ; and "PEACE", a tortured gale of noise made for an Amnesty International campaign against the death penalty. The three-part "Dharma" suite floats somewhere between Sakamoto’s Little Buddha score and his overlooked New Age tendencies, while the arpeggiated "Meditation" adds some classic Tangerine Dream to the atmosphere.
Year Book is also an endearing reminder that Sakamoto remains a man of great humor. "AUDI 2011"—a title that might as well be vaporwave—observes "the beauty of the Audi car’s streamlined body" (says the liner notes) through a player-piano experiment not unlike those on Aphex Twin’s recent EP, while "Otowa" sounds like a pointed commentary on the sterile pseudo-classical that usually steers luxury car commercials. And the two long "Nokiartek" pieces are without a doubt the most alienating creations ever billed to a major cellphone company. There’s a deep amusement in realizing that Sakamoto’s most corporate commissions tend to sound the weirdest and least sociable.
"Whitescape#2", a haunted minute of piano and pixelation, takes us up to the weeks before Sakamoto’s diagnosis, and the end of his body of work to date. In his official announcement—still tacked to his website’s front door—he promises a return to music after a full recovery. There is no reason to believe he won’t. But even were he to stop writing music tomorrow, Year Book 2005–2014 is yet more evidence that Sakamoto’s discography is by now a memory bank so rich and vast you could spend a lifetime in it.
