Through ‘Ryuichi Sakamoto | Art Box Project’, Ryuichi Sakamoto releases a special annual Art Box set that summarizes his musical activity over the year leading up to its release. These limited-run collections sell out every year. 2023’s release is based on a set of vinyl records Sakamoto made especially for an installation that he directed for the Japan-based progressive artist collective Dumb Type, which will now be made available for members of the public to own themselves for the first time.

Sakamoto was the director of the Dumb Type exhibition ‘Playback’, which was held in Munich in 2022. The concept for the exhibition was to collect field recordings from 16 regions around the world and play them back in one place, creating a bird’s-eye view of the location and time of each recording, along with the unique personal sound of each contributor.

In addition to compiling these 16 tracks, the Art Box also includes Sakamoto’s previously unreleased ‘Tokyo 2021’, for a total of 17 vinyl records. The A-side of each record includes the field recordings from each city as featured in the Dumb Type ‘Playback’ installation and another exhibition, ‘2022’. On the B-side, each record features an imprint of the world map centered on the location in which the A-side was recorded, and, using a special technique created by artisan vinyl manufacturer AUTORA FACTORY PLATE, the shading of each map has been transposed into grooves on the record, resulting in a visible and audible world map centered on each location that floats within the translucent vinyl. (Please note that while the B-side makes a sound based on the pattern of the map, it does not include any music.)

This Art Box with art direction by Dumb Type member Shiro Takatani will be released on August 30, and strictly limited to just 100 sets worldwide.

A special website that includes a detailed introduction to the Art Box written by art journalist Tetsuya Kozaki is now available, and reservations for the art box can be made on the site.

In addition, from February 25, Dumb Type will hold an exhibition at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo titled ‘Japan Pavilion Exhibition in Tokyo — From the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia Dumb Type | 2022: remap’. The exhibition is a recreation of Dumb Type’s ‘2022: remap’ display in Venice, where they first welcomed Sakamoto as a new member with the reconstruction of his work ‘2022’; the Tokyo exhibition marks the first time ‘2022’ will be unveiled publicly in Japan. In addition to a version of the audio newly produced by Sakamoto, readings by Sakamoto’s close friend David Sylvian, Kahimi Karie and others along with the field recordings from various places around the world that are also included in this Art Box attempt to bring to light – through the visual language of Dumb Type – the meaning of standing in one place and listening carefully, and the nature of perception through machines. 

Comment from Ryuichi Sakamoto

“It begins by breaking.

For over 30 years, I’ve been wanting to make art pieces where the music itself is the artwork. There used to be many rules that prevented me from doing so, but now I finally can.”

—That’s what I said when I released my previous piece but that’s still very much true.

At the same time, I’m very excited to present this work that is art-directed by my long-term collaborator, Shiro Takatani and made of 17 analog records of which 16 are Dumb Type pieces and a recording of mine that we didn’t use for the installation.

Comment from Shiro Takatani

“Playback” is originally a sound installation piece that used analog records, which we created for the Dumb Type exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, 2018. I had always hoped to collaborate with different musicians to create the records. So for the Dumb Type exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich (that occurred May through September of 2022), I was so happy that we were able to present “Playback” with Ryuichi taking the lead.

The field recordings that were done by Ryuichi’s 16 friends and acquaintances ended up also being incorporated into the new installation piece titled “2022”, which we created with Ryuichi for the Venice Biennale. We did so  because the theme for the new piece was about “the ways in which we can perceive the world and the communication methods that have drastically changed with the spread of things such as social media and the coronavirus.” The piece also quoted from geography textbooks in the 1850s. The environmental sounds that were sent in from around the world worked as a trigger for people to imagine different places that were far away from the exhibition space.

This project is also an attempt at recognizing the noise that exists in cities around the world and to feel the atmosphere of a city that doesn’t exist in that space, through its sounds. I hope you will listen for the various sounds and silences that are around you too.

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Art Box Project 2023

Artist: Dumb Type + Ryuichi Sakamoto

Title: ‘Playback 2022’

Release date: August 30, 2023 (limited to 100 sets worldwide)

Special website: https://commmonsmart.com/pages/skmtartbox/

About Ryuichi Sakamoto

Ryuichi Sakamoto has lived many musical lives in his nearly 70 years. As a keyboardist and songwriter in Haruomi Hosono’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, he helped set the stage for synthpop. His solo experiments in fusing global genres and close studies of classical impressionism led to him scoring over 30 films in as many years, including Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. In the past 20 years alone, he’s written a multimedia opera, turned a glass building into an instrument, and travelled to the Arctic to record the sound of melting snow. That exploratory spirit runs through Sakamoto’s 2017 album, async, which paints an audio portrait of the passing of time informed by his recovery from throat cancer. “Music, work, and life all have a beginning and an ending,” said Sakamoto in early 2019. “What I want to make now is music freed from the constraints of time.”

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