When director Neo Sora was approached by his father, , to direct the concert film that became , urgency was in the air. Sakamoto and his team knew that the week-long sessions planned for September 2022 might be the last time the 70-year-old composer, whose cancer had recently escalated to stage four, might have the energy to record. But the urgency was not motivated only by a sense of dwindling time.
Even though he was so physically weakened that he could perform only a few songs at a time, Sakamoto felt full of ideas and creative energy. Sakamoto drew up new arrangements of some of the most notable songs from his career, prepared three new pieces, and contemplated ways to stage them; he imagined the studio lighting shifting with the daylight over the course of the performances, progressing from early-morning gloom to afternoon sunshine and back to stark twilight. This cyclical motion provides a somber echo of the subtext of the film: All things must end.
—the soundtrack to the film—could easily have been a maudlin document of Sakamoto’s final concert, but instead, it feels like a celebration of the irrepressible perseverance of one of popular music’s most steadfast experimenters. Sakamoto spoke occasionally of harboring a perfectionist’s drive. In 2016, after decades of era-defining music across genres and media, he that he still hoped to one day make a “masterpiece” before he died.
He seemed to think of his live performances the same way. “I try to be as clo.