THE PRESENCE (AND ABSENCE) OF RYUICHI SAKAMOTO

You never feel so much the bodily presence of composer Ryuichi Sakamoto while exploring the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo exhibit "Seeing sound, hearing time" as when he's sitting there before you at the piano – well, at least his ghostly holographic presence is, back to the audience, conjuring up chords from an auto-playing piano that cascades shards of white upward against an ultramarine screen.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

Even there – in a 1996 video collaboration with Toshio Iwai called "Music Plays Images x Images Play Music" – it's Sakamoto's absence that inhabits the surroundings. Sakamoto, who passed due to cancer in 2023, is found there in the periodic pulse of musical textures underpinning each installation of light, video, serene ripple pools, smoke boxes from the last two-plus decades – a time when the composer, who started out with quirky electronic outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late '70s and later bagged an Oscar for composing the soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, began veering into new territory: sonic textures, minimalism, and a kind of musical journey that seemed more in tune with breathing and living than with sequencers and synths.

My wife is the true Sakamoto nut, luring me into his collabs with, among others, David Sylvian and David Byrne. We watched, astonished, the 2017 documentary