In 1968 a teenage Ryuichi Sakamoto helped barricade his high school principal’s office during a student protest. The same person went on to study ethnomusicology and early synthesizers at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, form Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978, act opposite David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and become the first Japanese composer to win an Academy Award for The Last Emperor.

This deep dive centers on his belief that borders, geographic and musical, do not exist. It traces his discovery that Debussy had absorbed Indonesian gamelan music, his embrace of the Roland TR-808 and Yamaha DX7, the influence of Riot in Lagos on hip-hop and techno, the vocoder and gated reverb of Behind the Mask, later covered by Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton, and the sparse, resonant piano music of his final years after cancer diagnoses in 2014 and 2021.

• Why the initially unpopular TR-808 became a new vocabulary rather than a fake drum kit
• Being too intimidated by Bowie’s focus on acting to ask him anything about music
• Film scores as cultural architecture, weaving erhu, European strings, and electronics
• Corporate work from the Sega Dreamcast startup sound to Nokia ringtones alongside anti-nuclear activism and the Commmons label
• Energy Flow topping Japan’s pop charts in 1999, the final film Opus directed by his son Neo Sora, and his death in March 2023 at 71