Thousand Knives


Thousand Knives is the debut solo album by Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. Released in 1978, it is a mostly electronic music album, foreshadowing his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra later that year.

Overview

The album is named after Henri Michaux's description of the feeling of using mescaline in Miserable Miracle.
The title track begins with a vocoded Sakamoto reading "Jinggang Mountain", a poem written by Mao Zedong during his visit to a well in the Jinggang Mountains in 1965. The song proper is performed in a reggae hymn style, inspired by Herbie Hancock's Speak Like a Child album. The piece segues into "Island of Woods", a ten-minute analog synthesizer composition designed to sound like the natural sounds of an island. The modern classical piano piece "Grasshoppers" follows. On original copies of the album, the entire first side was indexed as one 24:40 long track.
The second side of the album contains varied electronic music pieces. "The End of Asia" uses the same melody as Haruomi Hosono's "Worry Beads" from Paraiso and the coda uses the melody of "The East Is Red", the national anthem of the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, the album as a whole summarizes Sakamoto's then-interest in Chinese history.

Legacy

"Thousand Knives" is a staple of Sakamoto's repertoire, being rearranged for his synth-pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1980 for their BGM album; as a classical trio for 8/21/1996; and for a piano duet on /05. Numerous other arrangements have been performed live over the years, both by YMO and by Sakamoto himself; these performances contain one of the earliest uses of the Roland TR-808 drum machine. "Plastic Bamboo" was also a staple of early YMO shows, though the only recording appears on their live album Live at Kinokuniya Hall 1978 released in 1994, sixteen years after being recorded. "The End of Asia" would also regularly appear during YMO shows, with a drastically different studio version included on their X∞Multiplies album.
The melodic lines in "Grasshoppers" and "The End of Asia" have been noted for their similarities to modern grime music. According to Logan Takahashi writing for Vice, the "bounciness and cartoonish sound quality" of the lead melodic line in "Grasshoppers" has a "strong grime feel" and he considers the melodic line a minute into "The End of Asia" as "the bedrock for sino-grime." This was a precursor to Sakamoto's 1982 song "Bamboo Houses", which has been described as the "earliest example of proto-grime" by Fact magazine.

Personnel