async

The device

Title track of the album async (Commmons, 28 April 2017). Duration: 6’01”. Composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto, produced by Sakamoto himself. It is the final track of the album (track 15), placed after fullmoon and before the closing silence.

The title comes from computing: asynchronous designates a process that does not synchronise with the main system clock — that operates according to its own cycle, outside common time. In audio signal processing, asynchrony produces phenomena of phase drift, loop desynchronisation, slight variations that accumulate to create an unstable texture. This is exactly what the piece does.

Track structure

The structure is cyclical and non-narrative — no development, no climax, no resolution:

1. 0’00–0’45 — Establishing the loop. An electronic piano motif is laid down, with very faint synthesiser sounds in the background. The loop is approximate in duration: around 8 to 10 seconds per cycle.
2. 0’45–2’30 — First drift. Concrete sounds enter progressively: electronic textures, possibly a field recording fragment. The main loop remains present but micro-variations appear — a slightly different note, a slightly offset timing. The asynchrony begins to operate.
3. 2’30–4’15 — Accumulation of offsets. Concrete sounds become more present. The main loop is now accompanied by a second layer slightly out of phase — the same motif, but beginning at a slightly different moment. The superposition effect creates a moiré texture.
4. 4’15–6’01 — Return and silence. Additional layers gradually withdraw. The main loop remains, increasingly bare. Very slow fade toward silence.

The procedure — the loop as thesis

async operates on a principle borrowed from Steve Reich (It’s Gonna Rain, 1965; Violin Phase, 1967): two or more copies of the same musical material, played simultaneously but at slightly different speeds, progressively create a desynchronisation that generates unexpected sound patterns. Reich called this phasing.

Sakamoto does not do phasing in the strict sense — but he uses the same principle of asynchrony. The difference is in intention: where Reich explored a pure process (desynchronisation as acoustically interesting phenomenon in itself), Sakamoto uses asynchrony as metaphor for the relationship to time of a sick man. The biological clock that no longer synchronises with social time. The chemo cycle that imposes its own rhythm, outside normality.

The title is a musical thesis. Async says: this is how time is experienced when one can no longer take synchronisation with the world for granted. The loop that always returns to the same point but never exactly — this is the experience of sick time.

The arrangement

Instrumentation difficult to determine precisely without a score. By ear: electronic piano (Sakamoto’s timbre, immediately recognisable), synthesisers (very discreet textures, probably sustained pads), concrete sounds (field recordings, positioned very far back in the mix), underlying low frequency (near-inaudible but present). No identifiable percussion.

Production by Sakamoto himself, recorded in his New York studio during 2015–2017. Sound quality is high resolution — Sakamoto has always been attentive to sonic capture. No aggressive compression, dynamics preserved, the concrete sounds are in the same reverb space as the synthetic sounds (no apparent separate treatment).

Tempo: indeterminable in the usual sense — the loop has no clear pulse. The cycle duration is approximate, around 8–10 seconds, but deliberately variable. The asynchrony is in the tempo, not only in the phase.

Filiation and resonances

Upstream: Steve Reich (It’s Gonna Rain, 1965 — pure phasing, loops of the same duration desynchronising); Alvin Lucier (I Am Sitting in a Room, 1969 — a recording replayed and re-recorded in the same room until it disappears into the space’s resonance); Brian Eno (Music for Airports, 1978 — asynchronous loops, cyclical structures without direction); Morton Feldman (indeterminate notation, floating durations, no pulse). Sakamoto is not a student of this tradition — he is an independent practitioner who converges on the same solutions.

Downstream: async influenced a generation of ambient electronic composers who adopted asynchrony as a stylistic tool. The documentary Coda (2017) made the album’s compositional process visible — it became a reference document on contemporary composition. 12 (2023) is the direct continuation: the same principle of presence in time, but even more stripped back.

Reading in light of the permanents

Permanent 1 — Traversal of techniques as method: async marks the traversal of the “musique concrète and repetitive minimalism” territory — a territory Sakamoto had never inhabited with this intensity before cancer. He does not traverse it as an aesthetic tourist, but because it is the only language that corresponds to his state. Necessity overrides programme. This is permanent 1 in its clearest formulation: the medium changes because the state changes, not because fashion changes.

Permanent 2 — Death as final editorial permanent: async is the moment when permanent 2 formulates itself explicitly for the first time. Sakamoto does not declare “I am making an album about death” — he composes from the consciousness of death, and this awareness informs every formal decision. The loop that does not synchronise is death that does not synchronise with normal social time. Asynchrony is not a literary metaphor — it is a musical structure that embodies the experience. Permanent 2 is not the subject of async: it is its form.

Why this track and not fullmoon or Life, Life: because async (the title track) is the only one that directly formulates the album’s thesis in its own structure. fullmoon is contemplative; Life, Life adds Tarkovsky’s text, which risks overloading interpretation. async (the track) says in six minutes what the entire album says in sixty-three: time that no longer synchronises, the loop that returns but never exactly, permanence within impermanence. It is the most economical and most precise formulation of permanent 2.

Critique + listening — cyclical structure and asynchrony described by ear; instrumentation estimated (no score available, album credits scant on detail); Steve Reich / Brian Eno / musique concrète filiation established by academic musicology and by Sakamoto himself in interviews (Red Bull Music Academy 2012, NHK 2017); cancer/time thematic connection described in the documentary Coda (2017).