RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: async AT THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY is a live performance film captured during an intimate concert by Sakamoto Ryuichi in New York City. Filmed during the production of Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA, the performance marked the first public unveiling of Sakamoto’s new opus async, hailed as one of the best albums of 2017 by esteemed publications such as Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.
Following the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Sakamoto made several trips to the worst affected regions, working with local schools to repair and replace damaged instruments. One of those instruments was a grand piano found in a school gymnasium in Miyagi Prefecture.
The piano was subsequently kept by Sakamoto with the intention of turning it into a work of art. With repairs kept to a minimum to preserve the piano’s natural tuning, he devised a self-playing device which performs a program on the piano reflecting seismic data collected from around the world.
Created to draw attention to the tsunami and its grander implications about the ephemerality of life, Sakamoto closes the film by describing what he hopes the Tsunami Piano represents.
Stephen Nomura Schible
Born in Tokyo, he studied film at New York University. He became assistant director for the documentary filmmaker Hara Kazuo and then he worked on the production of Japanese films such as Aoyama Shinji’s Eureka and Kawase Naomi’s Firefly. He also co-produced Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. In 2017 he directed Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival.
Anderson Le