In 2017 — three years into a publicly acknowledged fight with throat cancer — Sakamoto released a lush ambient album called async; he continued to make music until the very end. In his later ...

Ryuichi Sakamoto, an eclectic Japanese composer who ... sounds harvested from forests and oceans into the 2017 album “async.” Mr. Sakamoto, who had lived in New York City since 1990, was ...

In 2017, he released an album called async and had become a prominent voice in protesting nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. The documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda documented his efforts.

Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune ...

Sakamoto also acted ... He went on to release one of his most emotional albums, “Async,” in 2017, with its remix album “Async – Remodels” following in 2018, featuring young producers ...

(He ends up recording the piano for parts of “async.”) In “Coda,” the Geiger counter seems to be taking readings of both Fukushima and Sakamoto, who discovered he had Stage III throat ...

When Ryuichi Sakamoto was a high schooler in Tokyo, he had to ride a commuter train to get to class. The passengers were always crammed on, trapping one another between stray limbs and contorted ...

The ’90s saw Sakamoto expand in all directions ... From the first brutally bare chords of async’s opener “andata” to the plinking, atonal finale of 12, his reckonings with mortality ...