Ryuichi Sakamoto -- Sen no Knife（千のナイフ）

 

I'd like to start off this article with the initially ruefully humourous reaction to "Sen no Knife", Ryuichi Sakamoto's（坂本龍一）debut solo album from October 1978. According to the liner notes for the 2016 reissue of the album via J-Wiki, the very first pressing of 400 copies got sold...only for 200 of them to be returned to the record stores.😱 Well, that reminded me of one particular movie scene.

Yeah, I guess The Professor was indeed ahead of his time. That's what avant-garde is all about after all. I picked up "Sen no Knife" (Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto) as one of the purchases in my recent shopping spree, and putting it into the stereo for the first time last week, I thought it is pretty avant-garde now. I could only imagine what those 400 first purchasers back in the late 1970s must have thought. 

However, whereas those people were probably taking a chance on the fairly unknown Sakamoto with "Sen no Knife" just some weeks before his first collaboration with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi（高橋幸宏）and bassist Haruomi Hosono（細野晴臣）would spark a future legend in synthpop music via Yellow Magic Orchestra, I made my purchase of the album after decades of getting to know him through YMO, his works with other singers such as Akiko Yano（矢野顕子）, Taeko Ohnuki（大貫妙子）and Miki Imai（今井美樹）, his acting performance with David Bowie in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", his Oscar win for "The Last Emperor" and other solo works in various genres (dang, I think I just broke a record for longest sentence). In other words, I was long ready to try out "Sen no Knife", especially after having seen the cover in record guides over the years. Incidentally, it was his YMO buddy, Takahashi, who came up with the idea for the photo of the album cover and perhaps the fashion for Sakamoto. I guess it must have taken quite an imaginative mind to have a good friend pose in a sudsy bathtub with a live electric lamp. Moving on...

As I said earlier, I had all those years of Sakamoto music playing around in my head to know that what I was probably going to hear from "Thousand Knives" was going to be pleasantly out there and Sakamoto-esque. In fact, I'd already heard the first (and title) track in its YMO form when I got that audiotape of the band's BEST collection in 1982 and then through the source album "BGM". I mentioned in the article for "BGM" that I found it even more alien and weird than the songs that I'd heard from the guys at the time. YMO's "Thousand Knives" struck me as being something the band came up with to show some more rock chops.

With the original "Thousand Knives" though, after that intro involving The Professor intoning Mao Zedong's "Jinggam Mountain" through a vocoder, there is something far more epic and adventurous as if the listener had accepted that invitation into a Tokyo that was one-half Edo Era and one-half high-tech 22nd century. At over 9 minutes in length, it would have to be. At the same time, there is something everyday about "Thousand Knives" since Sakamoto's additional melodies have that bubbly and percolating feeling of pots and steamers cooking up breakfast, lunch or dinner for the local hoi polloi while the antigrav vehicles whiz by. Meanwhile, there is also a hint of minor-key space jazz at 3:16, so perhaps the neighbourhood also has a hole-in-the-wall club that's just closing in the sunrise hours with the employees groggily heading for bed or one of those yatai with the steamers cooking. 

I also mustn't forget the bristling guitar solo by Kazumi Watanabe（渡辺香津美）. Maybe that could represent the dangerous street urchins lurking about, getting ready to steal a fruit from one of the shops. Anyways, by the end, it's obvious that "Thousand Knives" is all about the visit and not the stay since we're all taken away into something a little more sparse. It's quite the introduction by Sakamoto into his new world of computers and pop.

"Thousand Knives" the track is something that I was already familiar with, though. Now I was going into new territory. "Island of Woods" is taking me into the bizarre and sylvan via a tropical island run by Philip Glass (on Alpha Centauri?), it seems. Perhaps this is where those 200 naysayers had started thinking "I wonder what the refund policy is like at that record store?". But luckily for me, I already have that sense of Sakamoto. "Island of Woods" is less a song and more a soundscape. Some of those sounds include Motoya Hamaguchi（浜口茂外也）on a Brazilian bird whistle, a heart beating away and a dog barking along with the waves that finish this even longer track.

"Grasshoppers" melds the classical and the synthetics with a piano duet involving Sakamoto and Yuji Takahashi（高橋悠治）. It almost describes a movie plot on its own and I'm thinking of Pixar's "A Bug's Life" if it had been made as an unknown Studio Ghibli anime of that time with Sakamoto behind the score. There are a couple of different movements in there with the overall arc being happy-go-lucky with the grasshoppers just skipping all over the place while one part is contemplative as if the main character is handling an internal issue.

The writer for the English liner notes in "Sen no Knife", Paul Bowler, gave me the impression that "Shin Nihon Denshi Teki Minyo/DAS NEUE JAPANISCHE ELEKTRONISCHE VOLKSLIED"（新日本電子的民謡...New Japan Electronic Folk Song） is a Kraftwerkian delight delving once more into a traditional Japanese quarter like Asakusa. I can understand his sentiment completely especially with that repetitive gloppy synthesizer rhythm from the start which seems to be an aural equivalent of Gonk, one of the droids from the very first "Star Wars" film in 1977, walking all over the place. 

Although that last word of minyo is in there and it's been seen as a most Sakamoto-esque minyo, Sakamoto himself has rather scoffed at it being a Japanese folk song by saying "That is nothing like a minyo. It's totally Western music". Whatever anyone thinks of it though, it was a song that was played at YMO concerts in their early years.

One other interesting point of trivia regarding "DAS NEUE JAPANISCHE ELEKTRONISCHE VOLKSLIED" is that a good friend of Sakamoto for whom The Professor helped out in his own works and concerts was dropping by the studio almost every day during the album production. Sakamoto decided to put him to work for this particular track by arming him with the castanets and indeed I do hear them. That old buddy? Tatsuro Yamashita（山下達郎）.

In the title track, I heard some of the bloops, bleeps and the fluttering butterfly-like synth sounds that I would later hear in the brief musical bridge between "Tong Poo"（東風）and "La Femme Chinoise", two tracks on the very first YMO album. Bowler points out that "Plastic Bamboo" also has that embryonic feeling of what Yellow Magic Orchestra would have in store for us for the next few years. It does have the familiar bloops and bleeps from the songs of their early years along with a funky main melody. Not surprisingly, "Plastic Bamboo" also got performed at YMO concerts in the early days.

The final track, "The End of Asia", has actually already been covered by me in its own article but since I wanted to make this a complete set, I'm still throwing in a performance video by YMO here.

For all those synthesizer fans who want to know which instruments Sakamoto put into play when creating these most marvelous tracks, I will just transcribe what I found from the J-Wiki article:

Moog III-C+Roland MC-8 Micro Composer

Poly Moog / Mini Moog / Micro Moog / Obertheim

Eight Voice Polyphonic + Digital Programmer /

ARP Odyssey / KORG PS-3100 Polyphonic /

KORG VC-10 Vocorder / KORG SQ-10 Analog

Sequencer / Syn-Drums / Acoustic Piano / Marimba

As the commercial pitchman would say, "But wait! There's more!". Last night, I discovered this recent video by Doctor Mix that introduces his choices of Top 10 synthesizers since I was rather fascinated about some of these magical music machines after reading the above shopping list for Sakamoto. Think of this as a cool-down video.

Off the top, I pointed out that "Sen no Knife" had a rather mixed result among its first listeners back in 1978. But I think that sentiments have grown a little more fonder among folks since that time (I've got a feeling that buyers are hanging onto their copies), and I think that for any Sakamoto fan, "Sen no Knife" is a must-have now, at the very least to find out how the YMO sound had been developing and how a studio musician was able to ambitiously marry music and computers. It was certainly an interesting time for Sakamoto, Takahashi and Hosono since YMO's first album came out exactly a month after "Sen no Knife" which was released a few months following Takahashi's "Saravah!" album and Hosono's "Cochin Moon".

Please kids! Don't try this at home.