Zure (Opus, 2023)

Ryuichi Sakamoto performed "Zure" at the Opus concert in January 2023, months before his death from cancer, and the performance carries the weight of a man who knew he was documenting a final testament. "Zure" — meaning deviation, displacement, or shift — is characteristically Sakamoto: a piece built on the productive tension between order and its disruption, between where a sound is expected to land and where it actually arrives. The black-and-white cinematography of the Opus film frames him alone at the piano in empty space, and the recording captures every detail of his touch — the particular way he approaches a key, the quality of the silence he leaves around notes. The harmonic language is advanced but never cold, drawing on the jazz harmony he absorbed alongside classical training and the ambient sensibility he developed through his collaborations with Brian Eno. There is something in the live-recorded piano sound that a studio recording cannot capture: the instrument's natural resonance in the room, the microphone's pickup of the hall's acoustic, the evidence of a body at work. Sakamoto titled this concert Opus — meaning work, but also a final collected statement. Listening to "Zure" now is an act of witness, being present for the transmission of something that will not be transmitted again by the same hands.