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He started sketching ideas for a solo album in 2014, but they were scrapped after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, which he had to pause his career entirely. As a result, he focused most of his time on scoring films instead of producing solo material. Since 2009, Ryuichi Sakamoto had an eight-year period where he was unable to inspire himself in his composition process. A set of remixes of songs from async, titled ASYNC – REMODELS, was released in December 2017. It was critically acclaimed, landed in the top twenty of the Japanese albums chart and in the top five of Billboard's American Top Classical Albums chart, and was ranked the best album of 2017 by Fact magazine. Promoted with two art museum installations, a short film contest, and premiering via a listening event at Big Ears Festival, async was first released in Japan by Sakamoto's label Commmons in March 2017 before Milan distributed it to other nations in April 2017.
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Consisting of a combination of bizarre interpretations of familiar musical instruments, unusual textures both acoustic and electronically-made, samples of recordings of people such as David Sylvian and Paul Bowles doing readings, and everyday sounds borrowed from field recordings of city streets, async has underlying themes of the worries of the end of life and the interaction of differing viewpoints in humanity. It is also his first full-length solo record since recovering from throat cancer in 2015. Async is the nineteenth solo studio album of Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and his first one in eight years since Out of Noise (2009).