Ryuichi Sakamoto has passed from this world leaving his spirit and music with us. I feel a strange sense of connection as he was born four days after me in the same city, Tokyo. He once explained that he was "not religious, but maybe spiritual" and that his album Discord, divided into four parts: Grief, Anger, Prayer, and Salvation, "is to anybody or anything you want to name." Sakamoto reminds me that it's human to feel all these emotions and to have the courage to continue on this journey with compassion and responsibility doing the best we can with what we've got to save ourselves and others.
"The themes of Prayer and Salvation came out of the feelings of sadness and frustration that I expressed in the first two movements, about the fact that people are starving in the world, and we are not able to help them. People are dying, and yet the political and economical and historical situations are too complicated and inert for us to do much about it. So I got really angry with myself. I asked myself what I could do, and since there's not a lot I can do on the practical level, all that's left for me is to pray. But it's not enough just to pray; I also had to think about actually saving those people, so the last movement is called Salvation. That's the journey of the piece."