Most people would identify Düsseldorf, Germany, or Detroit—hometowns of Kraftwerk and Cybotron, respectively—as the birthplace of techno. Some might make a case for Sheffield, England, and its scions the Human League and Cabaret Voltaire. One city that never comes up is Tokyo. Yet Yellow Magic Orchestra—the trio of Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Ryuichi Sakamoto—has arguably the strongest claim of all to the “Godfathers of Techno” title.
Formed in 1978, YMO’s sound centered around synthesizers and was largely aimed at the dancefloor. But unlike any of the other contenders above, a substantial proportion of their early recordings consisted of instrumentals—one of techno’s hallmarks. True, those albums used Takahashi’s hands-on drumming rather than programmed beats. But perhaps what ought to sway the decision in the Japanese group’s favor is that they were the first to use the word “techno” in connection with their music. Their second album, 1979’s Solid State Survivor, kicks off with “Technopolis,” and the record’s success in their home country spawned a Japanese form of New Wave known as technopop. Their fifth album, released in 1981, was called Technodelic. Then, clinching the contest, YMO released an EP called The Spirit of Techno in 1983—a year before Cybotron’s single “Techno City,” and while Kraftwerk struggled to complete an album with the working title Techno Pop.
“We invented technopop,” Sakamoto declared in a 1988 interview with Elle magazine. His insistence hinted that YMO’s failure to conquer the West and get proper credit—despite his own solo successes and Oscar-winning soundtrack composing—still rankled. Fellow musicians overseas offered consolation. UK techno duo LFO namechecked YMO as “pioneers of the hypnotic groove” in the opening track of 1991’s Frequencies and again in the single “What Is House,” before joining other British rave producers for the YMO tribute album Hi-Tech / No Crime. Inventors of Detroit techno, the Belleville 3—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—had listened to YMO’s albums as teenagers in rapt reverence as well. “All the YMO albums were amazing,” May told a Red Bull Music Academy audience in 2010, recalling “sitting in the car… pumping it really loud, like it was the latest Run-D.M.C.”
YMO’s connection to Black American music is particularly striking. “Firecracker,” the trio’s 1978 debut single, was released in the U.S. under the name “Computer Game” and reached No. 18 on the Billboard R&B chart. The group appeared on Soul Train to play it, along with their cover of Texas R&B outfit Archie Bell & the Drells’ 1968 hit “Tighten Up.” Afrika Bambaataa featured the bass-propulsive electro-disco groove of “Firecracker” in a live DJ performance at a Bronx high school circa 1979, a recording of which circulated for years on tape under the title “Death Mix” before finally coming out on vinyl in 1983.
While the futurism of “Firecracker” inspired young electro producers like Mantronix, the song revealed another essential side to the YMO project: retro-kitsch irony and a love of playing games with pop history. Based around melodic intervals that sound vaguely Chinese, the original “Firecracker” first appeared on Martin Denny’s 1959 exotica album, Quiet Village. Denny’s ensemble, wielding marimbas and mallets, trafficked in cliched images of geishas parting beaded curtains and hula girls in grass skirts and floral leis. Rather than seeing such associations as offensive, YMO found amusement in, as Sakamoto put it, “that fake image of Asian culture—exotic, typical stereotype image… created in Hollywood!” YMO took Denny’s orientalism and exported it back to the West with an extra layer of twice-removed simulation glazed on top.
Alongside the whimsy, though, a sincere ideal of sonic cosmopolitanism runs through both YMO’s work and each member’s solo career. Hosono talked of creating “sightseeing music.” Sakamoto, likewise, titled one solo record Esperanto, after the invented language its makers hoped would bring about international understanding, and coined the concept “Neo Geo” as the title of another album, heralding a post-geographical One World music of the near-future.
Japanese pop has long been open to imported ideas from around the world. Sometimes that has resulted in immaculately accurate pastiches; other times, it’s led to only-in-Japan hybrids and composites. Sakamoto’s work, both with YMO and solo, leans far more to the latter: It’s hard to imagine musicians from any other country conceiving a techno-ska cover of Elmer Bernstein’s Western theme “The Magnificent Seven,” like YMO did on their third album, ×∞Multiplies.
Speaking to The Fader in 2015, Sakamoto traced the roots of his sensibility back to 1868, when Japan, after 250 years of self-enforced isolation, opened up to the outside world and underwent rapid industrialization. “It almost destroyed the traditional music because… the Japanese government thought only Western culture and music was good,” he said. “We lost a stream of our traditional music—since then, musically, we are flowers without root.”
Sakamoto learned piano from a preschool age, when he fell in love with European composers, starting with J.S. Bach before moving onto Claude Debussy. He started to embrace the avant-garde of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis at age 11. By the time he entered the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1970, he was exploring the dizzying possibilities offered by synthesizers like the Buchla and Moog. Prefiguring YMO’s doubled interest in the futuristic and the exotic, Sakamoto also studied Indian and African music, and dreamed of being an ethnomusicologist.
Through session work, he encountered Hosono, who was five years older and a veteran of various Japanese avant-pop outfits. Yellow Magic Orchestra was initially Hosono’s idea before he recruited Sakamoto and Takahashi, formerly of the glam group Sadistic Mika Band. While Hosono was the leader of YMO and the only member credited as producer on their first four albums, Sakamoto emerged as a potent counter-force, resulting in creative sparks and personal friction that ultimately split the group. “I arranged the tracks,” Sakamoto told the music journalist Geeta Dayal in 2006, adding that they nicknamed him “Professor,” because “I studied in a conservatory. I knew harmony, counterpoint, how to write a sonata, a fugue.”
Although YMO appeared as a trio in photographs and album artwork, they were really closer to a quartet, thanks to programmer and sound engineer Hideki Matsutake. For a time there was a shadowy fifth member-of-sorts, English lyricist Chris Mosdell; the Anglophonic nature of most of the group’s lyrics and titles indicated their ambition to invade the Western pop sphere.
In many ways, YMO took cues from Kraftwerk, who similarly produced English-language versions of their albums outside Germany. (“We wanted to make a Japanese Kraftwerk,” Sakamoto declared in a 1998 interview.) Just as Kraftwerk played on Germanic cliches of discipline and stiffness, YMO deliberately “used a lot of stereotyped images about Japanese people,” Sakamoto said.
One of these stereotypes—Japan as the vanguard of hi-tech, just that little bit further into the future than the rest of us—was actually grounded in economic realities. When YMO launched their career in the ’70s, their native land was already leading the world in the research, development, and exporting of consumer electronics. The Japanese government poured a fortune into the research and development of microchips—the same integrated circuit technology celebrated in YMO’s album title Solid State Survivor. On their 1978 self-titled debut album, the tracks “Computer Game: ‘Theme From The Circus’” and “Computer Game: ‘Theme From The Invader’” nodded to Japan’s dominance of the world’s arcades.
Another reason to credit Japan as the birthplace of techno is because most of the foundational technology behind electronic dance music originated there: synths like the Yamaha DX7 and Korg MS-20; Akai’s samplers and MPCs; the Technics 1200 turntable. Above all, Japanese expertise gave the dance world a range of legendary Roland instruments, including the 808 and 909 drum machines, and the “acid house” 303 bass machine. Thanks to programmer Matsutake, YMO were plugged into state-of-the-art technology, and their recordings often featured the earliest public appearance of a new piece of musical equipment.
A case in point is the group’s 1981 record, BGM, which was one of the first albums to prominently feature the Roland 808 drum machine, subsequently a cornerstone of hip-hop and many rave subgenres. As much as the denatured percussion sounds and crunching beats, it’s the smeared synth timbres and edge-of-dissonance tonalities that make BGM the group’s most experimental work. Their next album, Technodelic, added an early version of the digital sampler, custom-built for YMO by a Toshiba engineer, that they used to turn Indonesian chants, gamelan sounds, and vocal snippets into track components.
The five-album run from their 1978 debut to Technodelic was a feat of sustained evolution as impressive as the sequence of Talking Heads recordings in that same time period. (Technodelic single “Taisō” actually came with an absurdist promo directed by Talking Heads and loosely inspired by the video for “Once in a Lifetime.”) While making giant leaps with each album, every member of YMO maintained a prolific and equally adventurous solo career. Having already debuted with Thousand Knives in 1978, Sakamoto recorded his second solo LP, B-2 Unit, in 1980, establishing a pattern of collaboration with musicians outside the home islands by recruiting XTC’s Andy Partridge and dub producer Dennis Bovell.
Over 40 years later, B-2 Unit still sounds futuristic, like a synthetic jungle skittering with odd-angled beats and rubbery sound-slithers. Tracks like “Participation Mystique” suggest a religious ceremony on an alien planet—structured and elegant, but unreadable. “Thatness and Thereness” is a kind of phenomenological ballad, while the lattice of chimes on “E-3A” looks ahead to Mouse on Mars’ idyllic ’90s electronica. As opaque as its cryptic title, B-2 Unit bypassed most listeners at the time. The exception was the single “Riot in Lagos,” a cult hit in the more daring clubs. Loosely inspired by Nigerian rhythm god Fela Kuti and drawing on Bovell’s spatial sorcery, the track propels Afrobeat’s syncopations far into a posthuman tomorrow.
B-2 Unit’s angular rhythms informed Sakamoto’s next major achievement outside YMO: a collaboration with David Sylvian, the singer of South London art-pop outfit Japan. Sakamoto co-wrote and played keyboards on “Taking Islands in Africa,” from Japan’s 1980 album Gentlemen Take Polaroids. Then, in 1982, Sylvian and Sakamoto recorded the astonishing double A-sided single “Bamboo Houses” / “Bamboo Music,” roping in Sylvian’s brother and Japan drummer Steve Jansen for the jolting rhythms. As the title hints, the core of the sound is a kind of synthetic simulation of the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute. But the way the textures are used—folded planes of blurry translucence, like origami made of frosted glass—propels ancient tradition into the disorienting future. Amazingly, this double portion of avant-pop cracked the UK Top 30.
An even larger hit followed in 1983 with the exquisite “Forbidden Colours,” where Sylvian added an achingly poignant vocal to Sakamoto’s fluttery theme for the World War II movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. (In the film, Sakamoto plays a Japanese officer who develops a homoerotic fascination with a British prisoner of war, played by David Bowie.) The soundtrack’s success plunged him into a career composing for movies, working alongside directors like Bernardo Bertolucci, whose The Last Emperor earned Sakamoto an Academy Award.
The delirious experimentalism of B-2 Unit and the Sylvian collaborations recurred in flickers on later Sakamoto albums—most strongly on the dense thickets of Esperanto. But increasingly, Sakamoto’s solo work slipped into a mold of chic tastefulness, overly polished and overloaded with overseas guests (1989’s Beauty, for instance, featured Youssou N’Dour, Robert Wyatt, Brian Wilson, Sly Dunbar, Robbie Robertson, Jill Jones…). By 1995’s Latin-influenced Smoochy, the output got a bit too adult and easy on the ear.
In the early 21st century, Sakamoto entered a new phase of recharged creativity, catalyzed by a new collaborator. Alongside Carsten Nicolai, better known as Alva Noto, Sakamoto made a series of brilliant ambient records that merged his own Harold Budd–esque piano with the wisps and clicks of the German producer’s sound-design: 2002’s Vrioon, 2005’s Insen, and 2011’s Summvs, featuring a surprising and lovely cover of Brian Eno’s “By This River” from Before and After Science. Sakamoto and Noto also collaborated on an impressive score for 2015’s Oscar-winning The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
This partnership with Noto reoriented Sakamoto’s solo work these past two decades, from the underscores he created for L.O.L. (Lack of Love) (an evolutionary life simulation game) to the aqueous wonderland of Plankton (a collaboration with a biologist and a visual artist) to his acclaimed solo album Async. Recorded after his first up-close brush with death, in the form of throat cancer, the 2017 album is Sakamoto’s Blackstar: a twilight meditation on memory and mortality. Sakamoto marshalled a unique palette largely derived from found urban sounds and prepared instruments—in one case, the “preparation” was Nature’s work: a tsunami-drowned piano, decayed and out-of-tune. These raw sonic ingredients were simultaneously textural and freighted with personal meaning, evoking the fragile preciousness of existence.
Two Async pieces brought the theme of transience into painful clarity. On “Fullmoon,” author Paul Bowles, who died in 1999, is heard reading a passage from his novel The Sheltering Sky (the movie version of which Sakamoto scored). “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really.” Friends of Sakamoto’s from all over the world then read out Bowles’ words, each in their own language. On “Life, Life,” the feeling is more radiant, a blend of defiance and acceptance. “I was, I am, and I will be/Life is a wonder of wonders,” intones David Sylvian, reading the words of Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky.
From the early ’90s onward, Sakamoto lived in New York. This relocation to the most cosmopolitan and polyglot city on the planet seemed to reflect a statement he’d made a few years earlier: “I don’t know what I am. I was born in Japan but I don’t think I’m Japanese. To be a stranger—I like that attitude. I don’t like nationalities and borders.” The ideal, latent in all of Sakamoto’s work, crystallized in 2003 as a kind of poetic manifesto. In the wake of 9/11, he teamed up with Sylvian to release a beautiful single titled “World Citizen”—not so much a protest song as simply a plaint. Its lines make for a fitting epitaph, words to live by and die by: “Why can’t we be/Without beginning, without end?/… I want to feel/Until my heart can take no more… I want to travel by night/Across the steppes and overseas/I want to understand the cost /Of everything that’s lost/I want to pronounce all their names correctly/World citizen.”
