Tuesday, June 13 through Sunday, July 2
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays at 12:30, 2:00, 3:30, 5:00, 6:30, and 8:00 p.m.
Fridays and Saturdays at 12:00, 1:30, 3:00, 4:30, 6:00, 7:30, and 9:00 p.m.
Sundays at 12:00, 1:30, 3:00, 4:30, 6:00, and 7:30 p.m.

The Shed – 545 West 30th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues)

Admission: $38 | $33 Seniors and Students

Created by legendary composer, producer, artist, and environmental activist Ryuichi Sakamoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra, The Last Emperor, The Revenant) and Tin Drum, KAGAMI represents a new kind of concert, fusing dimensional moving photography with the real world to create a never-before-experienced mixed reality presentation. Audiences will wear optically transparent devices to view the virtual Sakamoto performing on piano alongside dimensional art aligned with the music.

KAGAMI, which translates to “mirror” in Japanese, features Sakamoto playing ten original compositions including well-known works “Energy Flow” and “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” along with rarely played pieces, such as “The Seed and the Sower.” Presented in surround sound, the experience will be both collective and individual, inviting observers to connect to the work—and each other—throughout. While audiences may view the show in a seated format, they will also be free to wander and explore during the hour-long event.

To purchase tickets, please visit The Shed’s website.

Important Note

The mixed reality headsets used in KAGAMI will not fit comfortably over prescription eyewear. Guests requiring vision correction should wear contact lenses if able to do so. A limited number of corrective lenses will be available, but these do not guarantee perfect vision correction. Headsets are not approved by the manufacturer for use by children under the age of 14, and children under that age will not be permitted.

About Ryuichi Sakamoto

Ryuichi Sakamoto was a composer, producer, artist, and environmental activist born in Tokyo, making his debut in 1978 with the album Thousand Knives. Sakamoto’s diverse résumé includes pioneering electronic works in the legendary techno group Yellow Magic Orchestra and producing globally inspired pop albums and numerous classical compositions, two operas, and nearly 45 original film scores for directors, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Pedro Almodóvar, Brian De Palma, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. His film soundtracks have won prestigious awards, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globes. Sakamoto’s activism was widespread and included various environmental conservation efforts and promoting denuclearization and world peace. After 3.11 in Northeastern Japan, he became a strong voice of support for the victims of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima.

Sakamoto made considerable contributions to the art world with both solo and collaborative installations and multi-piece exhibitions presented in galleries and museums worldwide. Most recently, M WOODS (Beijing) presented the largest and most comprehensive collection spanning 30 years devoted to Sakamoto’s artworks in various media, centering around eight large-scale sound installations.

In 2017, the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA (Stephen Nomura Schible) was released, coinciding with the release of his renowned 14th solo album, async. Additionally, Sakamoto presented unique performances at the Park Avenue Armory (NYC), later released worldwide as the film Ryuichi Sakamoto: async Live at the Park Avenue Armory.

Premiering at the Holland Festival 2021, Sakamoto and longtime collaborator Shiro Takatani presented a new theater piece, TIME. TIME continues to tour the world, bringing the artist duo’s last collaboration to longtime and new fans alike.

On January 17, 2023, his 71st birthday, Sakamoto released 12, his 15th solo album. The new album is a collection of 12 songs selected from musical sketches Sakamoto recorded like a sound diary during his two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer.

Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away in March 2023.

There is, in reality, a virtual me.
This virtual me will not age, and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries.
Will there be humans then?
Will the squids that will conquer the earth after humanity listen to me?
What will pianos be to them?
What about music?
Will there be empathy there?
Empathy that spans hundreds of thousands of years.
Ah, but the batteries won’t last that long.
— Ryuichi Sakamoto, 2023

The making of KAGAMI. Photo courtesy Tin Drum.

About Todd Eckert

Todd Eckert was first published as a music journalist at age 14 and became an editor of the US national OnlyMusic Magazine at 17. He produced the award-winning feature film Control about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division. In 2012, he joined the mixed reality technology group Magic Leap and served as director of content development before leaving to found Tin Drum in 2016. Eckert directed Marina Abramovic in The Life, which premiered in 2019 as the world’s first mixed reality, large-scale public performance.

About Tin Drum

Tin Drum is the world’s premier studio producing content for mixed reality devices. Founded in 2016 by Todd Eckert, this collective of artists, engineers, designers, and technologists blends uniquely dimensional form with the real world to create experiences impossible through other media. The results are without modern precedent and are changing the definition of engagement in recorded performance. Tin Drum creates content in collaboration with world-renowned artists, creators, and performers. In partnership with Christie’s, Tin Drum was the first to sell a mixed reality production at auction.

Susan McCormac 5/5/23 Susan McCormac 5/5/23

METROGRAPH HOSTS SAKAMOTO RETROSPECTIVE

Ryuichi Sakamoto: A Celebration

Friday, May 5 through Thursday, May 18

Metrograph – 7 Ludlow Street (between Canal and Hester Streets)

Admission: $17

Metrograph, the iconic New York City cinema, presents a film celebration of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the most innovative and influential composers of the 20th century. The retrospective, which runs from May 5 through May 18, is a fitting tribute to a true iconoclast who helped shape the sounds of modern music and film.

Sakamoto first gained recognition as a founding member of the Japanese electronic music group Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s. He later went on to establish a successful solo career, producing a wide variety of music that blended elements of classical, rock, and electronic styles. His groundbreaking work on film scores, which began with his collaboration with director Nagisa Oshima on the 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, in which he also starred opposite David Bowie and Takeshi Kitano, earned him worldwide acclaim.

The Metrograph retrospective features a selection of Sakamoto's most memorable film scores, including his collaborations with legendary filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Pedro Almodóvar, Jun Ichikawa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu. In addition to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, screenings include The Last Emperor, for which Sakamoto won an Academy Award for Best Original Score; the experimental biopic Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis; and The Revenant, which marked Sakamoto’s return to film composition after throat cancer treatments.

On Sunday, May 14, Metrograph is hosting a special Q&A session with and writer Sadie Rebecca Starnes and Sakamoto's long-time collaborator, filmmaker Stephen Nomura Schible, who directed the 2017 documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda. The documentary, which explores Sakamoto's life and career, features interviews with the composer and his collaborators, and provides a fascinating insight into his creative process.

Don't miss your chance to celebrate the life and work of Ryuichi Sakamoto at Metrograph. For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit Metorgraph’s website.

Select Films

The Revenant

Saturday, May 6 at 1:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 10 at 4:00 p.m.

Dir. Alejandro Iñárritu
2015 | 156 min.

Electronic experimentalist Sakamoto may have seemed an unusual choice to score a Western set on the 1820s frontier, but Iñárritu’s choice to have him do so paid off dividends. Triumphantly returning to film composition after treatment for throat cancer, Sakamoto, in collaboration with Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner of The National, created a grandly glacial soundscape to accompany Leonardo DiCaprio’s gravely wounded fur trapper Hugh Glass on his agonizing, hallucinatory mission of vengeance, towards a climactic confrontation with rival Tom Hardy that unleashes a terrible, glorious burst of aural violence.

The Last Emperor

Saturday, May 6 at 9:00 p.m.
Sunday, May 7 at 1:15 p.m.
Tuesday, May 9 at 6:15 p.m.
Thursday, May 11 at 4:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 17 at 3:45 p.m.

Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci
1987 | 163 min.

Sakamoto, his work featured alongside that of David Byrne and Cong Su, composed nine of the 15 original pieces on the soundtrack of Bertolucci’s film, a dazzlingly lavish, non-linear biopic on the decadent early life, love, and ignoble exile of Pu Yi (John Lone), China’s last ruling emperor, much of it shot on location in Beijing’s Forbidden City. A meeting between traditional Chinese instrumentation and contemporary avant-garde sensibilities, Sakamoto, Byrne, and Su’s soundtrack would win Best Original Score at the 60th Academy Awards.

Tony Takitani

Friday, May 5 at 4:45 p.m.
Saturday, May 6 at 4:10 p.m. and 7:15 p.m.
Sunday, May 7 at 1:00 p.m. and 5:20 p.m.
Monday, May 8 at 9:15 p.m.
Tuesday, May 9 at 7:15 p.m.
Wednesday, May 10 at 9:30 p.m.
Thursday, May 11 at 7:15 p.m.

Dir. Jun Ichikawa
2004 | 75 min.

Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Ichikawa’s graceful, coolly elegant film tells the story—with the help of a drily detached third-person narrator—of the lonesome existence and sudden romantic awakening of its title character (Issey Ogata), who finds happiness in married life after years of isolation, with his only complaint that his lovely wife, Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), has a passion for designer clothes that threatens to drive a wedge between them . . .

A sublimely sensitive work of sly social commentary, newly restored, with Ryuichi Sakamoto’s delicate score adding subtle emotional shading.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

Friday, May 12 at 4:30 p.m.
Saturday, May 13 at 12:30 p.m.
Thursday, May 18 at 6:45 p.m.

Dir. Nagisa Ōshima
1983 | 123 min.

Sakamoto’s first film score was for Ōshima’s taut World War II-set drama in which the musician also starred as Captain Yonoi, the bushido code-obsessed commandant of a Japanese POW camp in occupied Java who enters a war of wills with unbreakable South African internee David Bowie, a conflict fraught with repressed, forbidden lust. In addition to proving himself a commanding, focused screen actor, Sakamoto delivered a plaintive, haunting score of delicate synths expressing the characters’ unspoken desires, its glass harp-sampling title track becoming a minor radio hit when matched with lyrics by David Sylvian and released as “Forbidden Colours.”

Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis

Friday, May 12 at 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 14 at 9:15 p.m.
Wednesday, May 17 at 9:00 p.m.

Dir. John Maybury
1998 | 87 min.

Derek Jacobi stars as Francis Bacon in John Maybury’s experimental biopic of the revolutionary painter, inspired by the authorized biography The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon and employing distorted visuals that approximate the tormented grotesquerie of the subject’s canvases, which focuses on Bacon’s tumultuous relationship with his penny-ante East End hoodlum muse George Dyer (a pre-Bond Daniel Craig, in his breakthrough role). Sakamoto’s drone and noise-heavy score adds immeasurably to the overall sense of disgust and disorientation in a film that endeavors not just to recap the facts of Bacon’s life, but to filter them through his anguished vision.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA

Sunday, May 14 at 6:50 p.m.
Wednesday, May 17 at 6:45 p.m.
Thursday, May 18 at 9:20 p.m.

Dir. Stephen Nomura Schible
2017 | 100 min.

A precious glimpse into the creative process of the late synth-pop star, film composer, and activist Ryuichi Sakamoto, Stephen Nomura Schible’s deeply affecting film picks up with its introspective subject as he returns to music-making after having been diagnosed with cancer, channeling his new awareness of his mortality into his latest work.

Q&A with director Stephen Nomura Schible and writer Sadie Rebecca Starnes on Sunday, May 14th

KAGAMI by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Tin Drum

KAGAMI