Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023) lived many musical lives over his 71 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. He also wrote a multimedia opera, turned a glass building into an instrument, and travelled to the Arctic to record the sound of melting snow. '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.'