A biography for Ryuichi Sakamotohasn’t been written yet.
“I'm just delighted to be living, to be able to have a simple conversation, to feel a ray of sunlight on my skin and listen to the breeze move through the leaves of a tree.”
“I'm always looking out for interesting people.”
“The key concept is to open your ears. Music can be here and there, anywhere surrounding you.”
“Japanese people can feel some attachment in what they are making, whether it is a car or a TV or a computer.”
“I'm not the ambassador of Japan or Japanese culture.”
“I'm a terrible drummer; I almost cannot play the guitar nor sax nor trumpet.”
“Although I don't understand Russian, I like the sound.”
“My concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise.”
“Since the early 1990s, I had been very worried about the state of the environment, and by the end of that decade, I realized I needed to do something about it.”
“Music has become something different from the past, when it was one hundred per cent live. Throughout the twentieth century, it was recorded, and the medium adjusted.”
“The majority of the people think that noise is not music. I want to accept noise and even errors and glitches. I enjoy them.”
“When we went to see the first rough cuts of 'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence,' I fell to the floor because my acting was so bad. I wrote music to compensate for my bad acting.”
“Time in our universe is always one way: no going back, no reverse. In music, you can reverse it!”
“When I do one thing for a long period of time, my attention is usually then drawn in the opposite direction.”
“My main interest in synthesizers when I was an older teenager was to escape from the spell of the 12-tone system or, in a more broad sense, the spell of the European modern-music system. That led me to explore towards electronic music and ethnic music.”
“I have been a long time fan of Jean-Luc Godard. It's my dream to work with him.”
“The first music I got really into was Bach.”
“You're changing every day, right? Your curiosities and ambitions change, your ear changes, the music you like changes - and the music you want to make, too.”
“A young musician needs a powerful laptop and a good analogue synthesiser.”
“It's a very intimate, closed universe, doing my own music. It's just me, basically. I have to inspire myself; I have to do everything by myself.”