Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async: Recording, Tracks, and Context

Where the Album Was Born

In 2014, Ryuichi Sakamoto was diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer and placed his musical activities on hiatus. Interviews published in the year of the album’s release reported that he had reached complete remission. His work immediately after returning centered on film scores, including the 2015 score for The Revenant, co-composed with Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner, followed by the score for Rage (Ikari) in 2016. As an original solo work, his previous release had been 2009’s out of noise, meaning that music written for other people’s moving images occupied most of the eight years leading up to async.

He had not lacked plans for a solo record. He had begun sketching ideas in 2014, only to scrap them entirely after his diagnosis. He started over from a blank slate in April 2016 after finishing his work on the film Rage, spending about eight months building the album. Only the opening track, “andata,” had been written prior to his diagnosis. In interviews, Sakamoto explained that he approached the record thinking it might be his last, determined to try everything he wanted to do, and noted that he stayed away from social media as much as possible throughout those eight months of production.

On the musical side, the official page from international label Milan Records summarizes the concept as follows. Drawing inspiration from everyday objects, sculpture, and nature, Sakamoto assembled the sounds and music he most wanted to hear himself. He developed and recorded the project primarily in New York, incorporating field recordings and sounds gathered in museums around the world. Midway through production, he arrived at the idea of creating an imaginary soundtrack for a nonexistent Andrei Tarkovsky film. Its themes span asynchronism, prime numbers, chaos, quantum physics, the boundary between life and artifice, and the boundary between noise and music. As sources of inspiration, VICE (THUMP) points to the crystalline minimalism of Claude Debussy and the late free jazz of John Coltrane, while the English Wikipedia entry notes sound sculptor Harry Bertoia as a major influence.

The title “async” is an abbreviation of “asynchronization” (Japanese Wikipedia). Sakamoto remarked that human beings tend to take pleasure in synchronizing with one another, which made him want to create music that refuses to synchronize, music that speaks in a nonexistent language. The reason it had taken him so long to realize this long-held idea, he explained, was the difficulty of keeping the material asynchronous while still making it hold together as music. On this record, sounds overlap without resolving into conventional harmony. Touching on the human habit of judging sounds as good or bad, Sakamoto invited listeners to hear each sound on its own terms without preconceptions. He also connected this idea to his view of contemporary society, where people with similar interests gather into insular groups that barely communicate with groups holding different concerns.

His habit of collecting sounds predates this album by decades. Sakamoto recalled realizing as a high school student on a packed commuter train that he could distinguish more than ten separate sounds at once, and he continued gathering sounds he heard from then on. The same interview notes that he was born in 1952, the exact year John Cage composed 4’33”. Treating music as an assembly of sounds did not appear out of nowhere on async; rather, a lifelong preoccupation came together all at once under the assumption that this might be his final record.

Another crucial backdrop is the year 2011. Following the Great East Japan Earthquake, Sakamoto spoke of feeling firsthand how fragile human civilization is and how powerful nature remains, and he stayed deeply involved in relief efforts in the affected regions. async includes the sound of a piano whose tuning was naturally warped after being submerged in the 2011 tsunami.

Inside the Recording Sessions

New York served as the center for both conceptualizing and recording the album. The credits also list Bastyr University Chapel in Kenmore, Washington, Germano Studios in New York, Kyoto City University of Arts, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York as recording locations. At his home studio, Sakamoto recorded two Steinway pianos. The recording period ran from April to December 2016.

The sound source that defines this record is the piano submerged in the tsunami. The documentary film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (directed by Stephen Nomura Schible, 2017) includes a scene at a high school in Tohoku where Sakamoto plays a small Yamaha grand piano that survived the tsunami. According to a review from the Venice Film Festival, Sakamoto described the experience as feeling like playing the corpse of a drowned piano. In his view, a piano is a systematically and industrially engineered instrument, yet this particular instrument submerged by the tsunami had been reclaimed by nature, and its altered tuning was nature’s own work. Even equal temperament, a human convention, falls apart if left untuned over a long stretch of time. The tsunami piano is used on the fourth track, “ZURE,” and the Japanese Wikipedia entry identifies it as a piano kept in a storage room at Miyagi Agricultural High School, whose buildings were struck by the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Specific details also survive on how the environmental sounds were gathered. Sounds recorded through a mobile phone microphone while walking through New York, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Paris became part of the raw material. The fifth track, “walker,” consists largely of Sakamoto’s own footsteps recorded in the leaf-strewn woods surrounding Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut. Sakamoto had previously performed for about 45 minutes at the Glass House with Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), and the technique of attaching contact microphones to glass plates to strike and bow them grew out of that experience.

The tenth track, “tri,” is a recording of triangles. Performed by three New York-based percussionists, Ian Antonio, Levy Lorenzo, and Ross Karre, it was captured live in a single simultaneous take with no editing. The score looked nearly impossible to play, to the point that Sakamoto himself doubted it could be realized, but the players demanded machine-like precision of themselves and recorded more than ten takes. In an interview, the interviewer assumed the latter half of the piece was programmed, prompting Sakamoto to correct the misconception.

The eighth track, “fullmoon,” is built on a spoken reading by Paul Bowles. The source material is Bowles’s own voice heard near the end of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Sheltering Sky (1990), reading the famous passage from his novel. Sakamoto, who composed the film’s score, obtained Bertolucci’s permission to use the voice he had first heard nearly thirty years earlier. Over a looped drone and Bowles’s voice, Sakamoto gradually layered voices reading the same passage in other languages. Ten translations were added to the original English, bringing the total to eleven languages. Russian came to mind first because of his love for Tarkovsky and because he loved the sound of the language even without understanding its literal meaning. From there the circle widened to Chinese and then to friends across different countries, adding readings in German (Nicolai), Persian (Shirin Neshat), Spanish, Icelandic, and Italian (Bertolucci). The readers are friends and friends of friends, many of them artists, writers, and musicians.

The album credits list the following contributors. Composition and production by Ryuichi Sakamoto (piano, synthesizer). Christian Fennesz (guitar, computer on “andata”), Hidejiro Honjo (shamisen on “honj”), Ko Ishikawa (sho on “Life, Life”), David Sylvian (vocals/reading on “Life, Life”), Ian Antonio, Levy Lorenzo, and Ross Karre (triangles on “tri”), and Northwest Sinfonia (strings on “garden,” with concertmaster Simon James). Recording and mixing were handled by Conrad Hensel at Germano Studios, mastering by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine, piano technician work by Kaz Tsujio, and cover photography and direction by Shiro Takatani.

Place in the Discography

Sakamoto released his debut solo album, Thousand Knives, in 1978. Even counting only major studio works, his catalog continued through B-2 Unit (1980), Esperanto (1985), Neo Geo (1987), Beauty (1989), Heartbeat (1991), and Sweet Revenge (1994). After Chasm in 2004, he released out of noise on his own commmons label in 2009 alongside the solo piano collection Playing the Piano. async arrived eight years later, the intervening years filled by film scoring, post-disaster relief work, and cancer treatment.

The release schedule had several distinct stages. In Japan, commmons released the CD (catalog number RZCM-86314) and digital edition on March 29, 2017, while Milan Records issued the international CD, digital, and vinyl editions on April 28, 2017. The vinyl edition is a double LP that adds the 7-minute-14-second bonus track “water state 2,” which does not appear on the CD. The Japanese vinyl pressing was originally scheduled for the same day as the CD before being pushed back to May 17 according to Japanese Wikipedia. The album peaked at number 20 on the Oricon weekly chart and reached number 5 on the US Billboard Classical Albums chart.

Post-release events also reflected the character of the record. From April to May 2017, an exhibition of “installed music” was held at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (Watari-um) in Tokyo. Created by Sakamoto and the filmmaking duo Zakkubalan (Neo Sora and Albert Tholen), the installation “async-volume” arranged small iPhone and iPad screens across the walls of a darkened room like a photography exhibition. The screens showed footage of Sakamoto’s New York home studio, living room, and garden, with the sound growing clearer as a visitor stepped closer. Because the mix of audible sounds shifted whenever a viewer walked through the room, no two people experienced the exhibition the same way. The work later traveled to South Korea in 2019, Beijing and San Francisco in 2021, Chengdu in 2023, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from 2024 to 2025.

Although Sakamoto made async thinking it might be his last album, he continued composing and released 12 in January 2023 before passing away in March of that year. UK magazine Fact named async the number one album of 2017 on its year-end list.

Critical reception was high immediately upon release. According to review aggregators cited on English Wikipedia, the album holds an 85 out of 100 score on Metacritic, with 10 out of 10 from Mixmag, 8.0 out of 10 from Pitchfork, and 4 out of 5 from Resident Advisor.

Live performances extended the album’s design onto the stage. In late April 2017, Sakamoto gave three performances at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, each lasting about an hour before an audience of roughly 100 people. The sound system used a 4.1-channel array across six speakers (including a subwoofer), with visuals and cover photography by Shiro Takatani. Alongside piano and synthesizers, Sakamoto played glass plates as instruments. The album’s earliest public premiere was a 5.1-channel listening event held at the Big Ears Festival in the United States in late March.

Track-by-Track Highlights

The 14 tracks fit within roughly 60 minutes, and no piece exceeds six minutes. The longest track is the second piece, “disintegration,” at 5 minutes 46 seconds, while the shortest is the title track, “async,” at 2 minutes 44 seconds.

1. andata (4:38)

The only piece written prior to Sakamoto’s diagnosis, placed at the very start of the album. Christian Fennesz contributes guitar and computer processing. It opens with a quiet piano melody before noise washes over it around the one-minute mark. Exclaim! wrote that this moment immediately signals that the album is no casual listen, while PopMatters described the Satie-like piano being pulled into darkness by funeral-like organ chords and white noise. Resident Advisor singled out the track’s electrical interference. Even though the album as a whole was made after his illness, the first sound heard is the piece written before it.

2. disintegration (5:46)

The longest of the 14 tracks. PopMatters described it as a piece where low, blunt piano notes are struck in seemingly erratic patterns before high-register instruments and a low, rumbling synthesizer establish a pulse. Resident Advisor cited its low, dissonant piano as a prime example of the album focusing on sound itself rather than melody.

3. solari (3:52)

Pitchfork noted that the track’s stately theme recalls Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 science-fiction masterpiece Solaris.

4. ZURE (5:11)

The track featuring the tsunami-submerged piano, using the sound of the instrument with its tuning left naturally warped. Pitchfork highlighted the rich reverb enveloping each restrained note, Resident Advisor pointed to synthesizer chords expanding into empty space, and PopMatters noted the noisy distortion cutting in and out like a weak radio signal.

5. walker (4:20)

A piece built around footsteps. Sakamoto recorded 10 to 15 minutes of his own footsteps walking through a forest floor covered in fallen leaves, and that recording accounts for most of the track. PopMatters described it as a dark, quiet piece layering forest-walk samples over a sustained low tone, while Paste wrote of a long melody flowing beneath the sound of treading on leaves.

6. stakra (3:41)

Pitchfork connected the track’s starburst-like electronic tones back to Sakamoto’s pioneering synthesizer work with Yellow Magic Orchestra.

7. ubi (4:03)

A piece where three reviews converge on the same detail. Resident Advisor wrote of a subdued piano melody overlaid with an unbroken, sonar-like electronic pulse; Exclaim! pictured rainy-day piano joined by a submarine-like ping and a high, thin drone; and Pitchfork heard a satellite-like signal running through spare piano reminiscent of the simplicity of “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.”

8. fullmoon (5:13)

A track toward which Sakamoto himself expressed particular affection. The vocal source is a passage from the closing pages of Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky (1949), reflecting on how life seems like an inexhaustible well because we do not know when we will die, even though most things happen only a handful of times, perhaps twenty more full moons. Starting in English, the passage expands across ten translations layered over a drone. In his interview with VICE, Sakamoto remarked on the beauty of speaking the same meaning across ten different sonic textures.

Critical response to the spoken-word tracks was divided. According to English Wikipedia, some critics viewed these pieces as the weakest moments on the album, with James Hadfield of The Japan Times writing that the voices sit uncomfortably in the mix. Pitchfork, by contrast, called them striking insertions. Paste noted that while the album occasionally pushes its themes a bit heavily, the patient layering of multilingual readings redeems the track, and wondered aloud why no Japanese reading was included.

9. async (2:44)

The title track, yet the shortest of the 14 pieces. Resident Advisor described it as an unsettling piece where sharply plucked strings pile up until they become indistinguishable from percussion, while Pitchfork wrote of detuned strings colliding roughly into noise.

10. tri (3:28)

A single unedited live take by three triangle players. Because the percussionists were perfectionists, they recorded more than ten takes until their playing aligned with machine-like precision. The fact that an interviewer mistook the recording for programmed sequencing shows how closely manual performance approached the machine. Resident Advisor called it the simplest track on the album, noting that letting the resonance ring out makes the overtones sound like a frequency-glitched sequencer.

11. Life, Life (4:23)

David Sylvian reads a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky, the poet and father of director Andrei Tarkovsky. Sylvian’s reading was originally recorded for a 2011 charity concert supporting victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and here it is backed by pizzicato strings, synthesizer, and Ko Ishikawa’s sho. The collaboration between Sylvian and Sakamoto dates back to 1982, yielding “Forbidden Colours” the following year when Sylvian added vocals to the theme from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (Pitchfork). Sylvian described this album as an expression of love and gratitude grounded in an awareness of life’s fragility. Pitchfork noted how the quiet melody slowly brightens at the close of the piece.

12. honj (3:41)

Featuring Hidejiro Honjo on shamisen, placed immediately after “Life, Life.” Resident Advisor singled out the high sustained resonance running beneath the plucked strings as a defining detail of the track.

13. ff (5:12)

Resident Advisor cited this angelic-toned piece as an example of the album’s New Age side, while PopMatters compared its quietly overlapping, long-sustained synthesizer chords to Brian Eno. Pitchfork described a luminous drone emerging on the penultimate track.

14. garden (4:16)

The closing track, featuring strings recorded by the Northwest Sinfonia with concertmaster Simon James. PopMatters noted that the “long-take” technique of stretching meditative chords over long spans appears here as well, adding that the timbre turns slightly harsh and distorted. Pitchfork called it a finale that sends the listener off on an ambient drift.

What First-Time Listeners Might Misread

Listeners who come to the record from Sakamoto’s name expecting melodic piano pieces in the vein of “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” will find their expectations upended almost immediately. Midway through the opening track, the piano is engulfed by noise and organ, and most of the pieces move through shifts in timbre and texture rather than melody, making the album ill-suited to melody-first listening. On the spoken-word tracks, listeners who try to follow the literal meaning of the words may also find it harder to hear the voices purely as music.

Where to Listen Next

async takes the form of music for a nonexistent film rather than an actual motion picture. A direct point of comparison written for an actual film is Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Listening to the two side by side clarifies the distance between music that serves moving images and music that has no images to follow.

As a Japanese composer who made the relationship between sound and silence a central compositional theme while also scoring numerous films, Toru Takemitsu and Japanese Environmental Music offers another natural entry point. Hearing it with async‘s abandonment of regular pulse in mind highlights how different Japanese composers have treated sound and negative space.

From the electronic side, Rei Harakami provides a revealing contrast. While Harakami arranged gentle electronic tones, he kept the underlying pulse intact. Placing his work next to async throws Sakamoto’s decision to let go of pulse into sharp relief.

This album also exists in a double-LP vinyl edition that includes “water state 2,” a track absent from the CD. For readers setting up a vinyl playback system, Beginner’s Guide to Vinyl Records: The First Three Components and How Placement Shapes the Sound serves as a practical starting point.

The same material also appeared in other forms after the album’s release. Released on December 13, 2017, ASYNC – REMODELS (Japanese catalog number RZCM-86410) collects reworks of the album’s material by Oneohtrix Point Never, Johann Johannsson, Arca, and others. Released on March 28, 2018, async surround (RZXM-86550) is a Blu-ray edition containing a 5.1-channel surround mix, visuals by Shiro Takatani, and “water state 2.” On February 2, 2024, async – immersion 2023 was released as a collaboration with Shiro Takatani based on a site-specific installation held in Kyoto.

Streaming links: Listen on Spotify / Listen on Apple Music

Sources

• Milan Records, “Ryuichi Sakamoto: async” official release page (concept, themes, recording approach), https://milanrecords.com/release/async/ (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Milan Records, “The Revenant” official release page (score credits for The Revenant), https://milanrecords.com/release/the-revenant/ (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Ruth Saxelby, “Ryuichi Sakamoto Is Listening Closer Than Ever,” The FADER, May 5, 2017 (cancer diagnosis, approach to production, Glass House, making of “tri” and “fullmoon,” Park Avenue Armory performances), https://www.thefader.com/2017/05/05/ryuichi-sakamoto-async-interview (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Corinne Przybyslawski, “Ryuichi Sakamoto Survived Cancer and an Earthquake to Make the Most Personal Album of His Career,” VICE (THUMP), April 28, 2017 (sources of inspiration, Paul Bowles voice, English and ten translations, tsunami piano, Great East Japan Earthquake), https://www.vice.com/en/article/ryuichi-sakamoto-async-interview/ (accessed October 12, 2026)
• David Rooney, “‘Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda’ Review | Venice 2017,” The Hollywood Reporter, September 3, 2017 (tsunami piano scene), https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/ryuichi-sakamoto-coda-venice-2017-1034872/ (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Andy Beta, “Ryuichi Sakamoto: async,” Pitchfork, May 1, 2017 (track-by-track commentary, collaboration with David Sylvian), https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23118-async/ (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Andrew Ryce, “Ryuichi Sakamoto – async,” Resident Advisor, April 26, 2017 (track-by-track commentary), https://ra.co/reviews/20955 (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Kevin Press, “Ryuichi Sakamoto: async,” Exclaim!, April 26, 2017 (commentary on “andata” and “ubi”), https://exclaim.ca/music/article/ryuichi_sakamoto-async (accessed October 12, 2026)
• “Ryuichi Sakamoto: async,” PopMatters (track-by-track commentary), https://www.popmatters.com/ryuichi-sakamoto-async-2495393803.html (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Robert Ham, “Ryuichi Sakamoto: async,” Paste, May 9, 2017 (commentary on “walker” and “fullmoon”), https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/ryuichi-sakamoto/ryuichi-sakamoto-async-review (accessed October 12, 2026)
• “Async (album),” English Wikipedia (personnel from liner notes, recording locations, production history, Sakamoto quotes, critical reception aggregate; credits for Fennesz on “andata” and Hidejiro Honjo on “honj” also match Discogs), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Async_(album) (accessed October 12, 2026)
• “async,” Japanese Wikipedia (release dates, title origin, vinyl edition, tsunami piano, Oricon chart peak), https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/async (accessed October 12, 2026)
• MusicBrainz, “async” Japanese CD edition (commmons, RZCM 86314, March 29, 2017), https://musicbrainz.org/release/2b3a7356-8319-438e-94f5-9e701c5effc0 (accessed October 12, 2026)
• MusicBrainz, “async – Remodels” (commmons, RZCM-86410, December 13, 2017), https://musicbrainz.org/release/376720a0-6353-4733-86f3-0a78d182c420 (accessed October 12, 2026)
• MusicBrainz, “async surround” (commmons, RZXM-86550, Blu-ray, March 28, 2018), https://musicbrainz.org/release/82316878-b6ff-44da-8be3-96c253d36cc7 (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Apple Music, “async” (digital release date and track durations), https://music.apple.com/jp/album/async/1216079429 (accessed October 12, 2026)
• “Ryuichi Sakamoto discography,” English Wikipedia (solo album release years and chart positions), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryuichi_Sakamoto_discography (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Ryuichi Sakamoto Official Site, “async-volume (2017),” https://www.sitesakamoto.com/artworks/16 (accessed October 12, 2026)
• Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, John Lehmann, 1949 (source text for the reading on “fullmoon”)
• Wikimedia Commons, File:Keigo Oyamada and Ryuichi Sakamoto.jpg (photograph by Joi Ito, July 29, 2007, CC BY 2.0), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keigo_Oyamada_and_Ryuichi_Sakamoto.jpg (accessed October 12, 2026)