Ryuichi Sakamoto 12 Review: A Starkly Beautiful Song Cycle About Mortality

Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote and produced his 15th studio album, 12, during a year-long recovery from cancer treatment. It’s a starkly intimate affair where, on some songs, the Japanese composer and pianist’s heavy breathing can clearly be heard in the mix, a conscious decision that underscores the corporal cost of his current musical efforts.

Sakamoto has likened 12 to a diary of sorts, with each of the album’s dozen minimalist tracks named after the day on which they were recorded. Its ever-shifting tenor and timbre mirrors the traditional grieving process, starting with a heightened sense of isolation from the outside world that eventually develops into feelings of frustration, agony, and, finally, acceptance.

Opening with the numbing sounds of Sakamoto’s sorrowful synthesizers before moving into more densely layered and foreboding arrangements—which reach a near-breaking point on “20220202,” the album’s fifth track—the listener can actively trace the composer’s fraught headspace as he comes to terms with his mortality. The compositions themselves are simple enough, serving to primarily function as walls of sound for Sakamoto to, as he says in the press notes, “shower” himself in. But their extreme clarity and stark tonalities provide a truly transcendent experience for those willing to indulge in their gorgeously austere textures.

The melancholic songs that make up the album’s first half, such as “20211201” and “20220123,” are all exquisitely paced to the point of deliberateness, allowing listeners to hone in on every purposeful note. Then, the album suddenly embraces a more traditional structure, where, at least when compared to the six-minute-plus ambient behemoths that come before, the five remaining piano-based tracks—which Sakamoto recorded after a bout of intense solitude and pensive reflection—are all succinct pieces that operate within the classical tradition.

Seemingly no longer content with the overwhelmingly dour direction his musical diary has taken, Sakamoto ends 12 on an ephemeral grace note: a brief closing track composed solely of a lone wind chime languidly clattering in the wind. Unlike albums such as David Bowie’s Blackstar or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Skeleton Tree, both of which confront death head-on, 12 is decidedly more reserved in its reckoning with human impermanence. Yet, even if it’s less forceful in its execution, Sakamoto’s poetic, metaphysical approach—a paradoxically delicate yet fearless plunge into the unknown—is equally as daunting and devastating.