Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1952–2023

AS A TEENAGER, I figured out that I wanted to be a serious music listener and set about learning everything I thought would help me get there. At the time, I saw music in tidy, discrete categories: genres, periods, countries, scenes, and subcultures were clean brackets that made the whole of human sound more navigable. I started with what was easily proximal (early aughts indie rock, mostly) and learned my way back from there. There followed a few frenzied years of CD ripping, torrenting, and downloading off of album-sharing blogs, until leapfrogging from one set of aesthetics the next area of understanding became like clearing levels on a video game. It mostly didn’t occur to me to venture outside of the West, because nothing in Young Marble Giants’ bare bones guitar pop or Harold Budd’s chilly piano mist ever offered me a convenient foothold. Shoegaze, post-punk, no wave! Done, done, done!