Ryuichi SakamotoRyuichi 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.”
https://www.sitesakamoto.com/

Shiro TakataniBorn in 1963, Shiro Takatani studied environmental design at Kyoto City University of Arts. He is one of the founding member of the artist collective Dumb Type, which was established in 1984. Besides Dumb Type, Takatani began a parallel solo career in 1998. In his solo activities, he has directed visuals for several theater productions, including Ryuichi Sakamoto's opera LIFE (1999). He created his own performance La Chambre Claire (premiered at Theater der Welt, Germany in 2008), CHROMA (premiered at Biwako Hall Center for the Performing Arts Shiga in 2012) and ST/LL (with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, premiered at Le Volcan – Scène Nationale du Havre, France in 2015). Takatani’s works were presented, among others, National Theater & Concert Hall Taipei, New National Theatre Tokyo, Singapore International Festival of Arts, Sharjah Biennial UAE. His first retrospective solo exhibition, Camera Lucida, was held at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2013. Dumb Type’s first large-scale solo exhibition, DUMB TYPE | ACTIONS + REFLECTIONS, was held at Centre Pompidou-Metz (France) in 2018 and Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2019-20. The latest theater piece by Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani, TIME was premiered at Holland Festival in 2021. In 2022, Dumb Type created a new installation 2022 for the Japan Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, welcoming Ryuichi Sakamoto as a new member. Also, Dumb Type solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich was held in the same year.