Mythology actually holds Sakamoto’s “One Thousand Knives” as the first track to ever use the famous Roland TR-808 drum machine. A member in the rising pop group called Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto found himself among the very first musicians to experiment with synthesizers and digital recording technology.
In 1978, Sakamoto had just earned his master’s degree in music from Tokyo University and was merely at the threshold of his lifelong artistic journey. The music itself seems to resonate with this same ramped-up, wired state of consciousness. Sakamoto recorded “One Thousand Knives” over an intense, 500-hour period in which he often went whole days without sleeping. While at work on his first solo record in 1978, the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto encountered this famous passage by poet Henri Michaux, writing on his own experimental mescaline usage. “…Suddenly a thousand knives, suddenly a thousand brilliant scythes of light set in lightning, huge enough to level whole forests, violently start slicing up space from top to bottom with gigantic slashes, with amazingly rapid slashes that I have to keep up with, inwardly, painfully… and when will it end… will it ever end?”
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