async

After eight years of silence as a solo artist, and in the shadow of a life-threatening illness, async arrives not as a return, but as a reckoning. Released in March 2017, it is Ryuichi Sakamoto’s nineteenth solo album and his first since recovering from throat cancer in 2015. That context lingers in every note, not as sentimentality, but as something quieter and more unsettling: a sense of time recalibrated.

Sakamoto conceived async as the soundtrack to a film that does not exist, inspired by the meditative cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. It makes perfect sense. The album unfolds like a series of scenes rather than songs, stitched together by mood, texture and the slow drift of thought. Piano, field recordings, spoken word, fractured electronics and orchestral fragments coexist without ever fully settling. Nothing quite resolves, yet everything feels deliberate.

At the heart of the record is Sakamoto’s shifting relationship with sound itself. He moves beyond composition in the traditional sense, treating instruments and noise as equal participants. A piano, left to detune naturally, becomes an extension of nature. Footsteps in a forest, recorded by the composer himself, form the spine of ‘Walker’. Street noise, rain, animals, breath, all enter the frame. It is less about melody than perception.

The album’s title is not decorative. async resists synchronisation at every level. Rhythms drift apart, tones collide, voices enter and exit without warning. Yet the result is not chaos for its own sake. Sakamoto is exploring the idea that dissonance can still be meaningful, that sounds do not need to align to coexist. In that sense, the record becomes quietly philosophical, reflecting on how differing viewpoints might inhabit the same space without collapsing into uniformity.

Mortality sits just beneath the surface throughout. It is never stated outright, but it is everywhere. On ‘Life, Life’, David Sylvian reads poetry that circles around existence and its fragility, while ‘fullmoon’ layers a reading from Paul Bowles that reframes life as finite, fleeting, almost impossibly small. These moments could feel heavy-handed, yet they rarely do. Sakamoto presents them with restraint, allowing the listener to sit inside the idea rather than be led through it.

Musically, the album is as varied as it is restrained. There are passages of near-silence, others of abrasive tension, and moments of unexpected warmth. Tracks like ‘Tri’ push towards mechanical precision through human performance, while pieces such as ‘disintegration’ and the title track lean into unease. Even at its most dissonant, however, async remains strangely inviting. It asks for patience, then rewards it with something quietly profound.

Critically, the album was met with widespread acclaim, with many noting its balance of experimentation and emotional depth. That balance is key. async is not an easy listen, nor is it meant to be. But it never feels inaccessible. There is a human presence guiding it, even when the sounds themselves seem to drift beyond language.

If this had been Sakamoto’s final statement, as he once feared it might be, it would have been a fitting one. async is reflective without being nostalgic, experimental without losing feeling, and deeply aware of time without rushing to define it. It is less an album than an environment. And once you step into it, it is difficult to leave unchanged.