I have always held Wim Wenders’ films close to my heart. From Wings of Desire and his road movies (such as Alice in the Cities and Paris, Texas) to acclaimed documentaries like The Salt of the Earth and Buena Vista Social Club, his works have always managed to capture my imagination and excite my senses. If I had to pinpoint a certain theme that permeates his whole oeuvre, I think I would choose freedom – or rather the pursuit of it.
This is also the case with Wenders’ latest film Perfect Days, shot entirely in Tokyo and written by Takuma Takasaki and Wenders himself. It follows the everyday life of Hirayama (played by Kōji Yakusho), a middle-aged toilet cleaner who lives and works in Tokyo. The film’s pace is slow and whatever little “action” takes place is portrayed in a subtle and delicate manner, reflecting the protagonist’s mild and gentle character.
Hirayama lives alone in a small apartment, full of books and music cassettes. He spends his days quietly, observing a strict daily ritual: he wakes up at dawn, grabs a refrshment from the vending machine, and drives his van to the city center to work. As soon as his shift is over, he pays a visit to the public bath to relax, followed by a drink in his local hangout. Once he returns home, he reads for a while and goes to sleep, often having elusive dreams of trees, leaves and other patterns.
Along with Hirayama, the other main protagonist is the film’s soundtrack, which subtly follows and comments upon the characters’ actions and feelings. From Velvet Underground’s Pale Blue Eyes and Lou Reed’s Perfect Day (which lends its title to the film) to The Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon and Patti Smith’s Redondo Beach, every song is organically tied to the storyline, strategically placed with precision and thoughtfulness.
An important element in the story is Hirayama’s love for music – mostly ’60s rock – and affection for cassettes, an old-fashioned analog medium that has long been superseded by digital formats in modern-day Tokyo like anywhere else. When his niece Niko (a reference to Nico, the German singer-actress who sang with Velvet Underground on their legendary debut album) asks him if a song is available on Spotify, he naively asks where exactly that “shop” can be found.
As the story evolves, we are offered a glimpse into Hirayama’s rich inner world, his intimate thoughts and feelings, always accompanied by the sound of his favorite music. Slowly but steadily, a portrait emerges of someone who has struggled to become his true self; who has fought and succeeded in gaining his own fragile freedom; who has learned to appreciate the little things and live in the present moment; someone whose sense of self is achieved through embracing both pain and joy, as pictured beautifully in the film’s closing scene, aptly illuminated with Nina Simone’s exhilarating music and words:
Oh, freedom is mine And I know how I feel
It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life for me
This year was sadly marked by the loss of acclaimed Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952 – 2023). A truly multifaceted artist, Sakamoto was a pianist, record producer, pioneer of electronic music (both as solo artist and founder of technopop super group Yellow Magic Orchestra), as well as an actor and film composer – remarkably, he both scored and acted in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) alongside David Bowie, as well as in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), for which he won an Oscar for original score.
At home in a diverse range of styles and genres, Sakamoto was a pivotal figure in electronic, pop, world and film music, throughout his long career from the late 1970s to his moving farewell performance in late 2022 and his last solo album 12, which was released in January 2023, two months before his death from cancer. In 2017, the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda was released, following the composer’s struggle with cancer and the creative challenges during the slow, yet fulfilling, process of creating new and meaningful music.
One of the things that quickly become apparent while watching Coda is Sakamoto’s admiration of film director Andrei Tarkovsky. Greatly influenced by Tarkovsky’s work, Sakamoto was particularly fascinated by the way the Russian director used sound to create unique and rich “auditory textures”. As he puts it: “Tarkovsky’s soundtracks create intimate soundscapes. In a sense, he was a musician.” Inspired by Tarkovsky’s use of Bach chorales, Sakamoto went on to compose solari, his own piece in the spirit of Tarkovsky.
In fact, Sakamoto’s mesmerizing album async (2017) can be viewed as a soundtrack for a nonexistent movie by Tarkovsky. In Life, Life we hear the words from the wonderfully meditative poem And this I dreamt, and this I dream by Arseny Tarkovsky (Andrei’s father):
To one side from ourselves, to one side from the world Wave follows wave to break on the shore On each wave is a star, a person, a bird Dreams, reality, death - on wave after wave.
Raising awareness
A dedicated environmentalist and activist, Sakamoto was a member of the anti-nuclear organization Stop Rokkasho and supported the closing down of nuclear power plants following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, actively participating in related protests. In 2012, Sakamoto also organized the No Nukes 2012 concert, which featured performances by several groups including Yellow Magic Orchestra and Kraftwerk.
Sakamoto’s environmental concerns intensified during the last decades of his life. As he relates: “My awareness of environmental crises started to trouble me around 1992. I began to sense danger, feel alarm. The environment wasn’t worsening on its own. There was a link to human activity, which means it could be fixed. But it all depends on the choices humans make. […] The Japanese people need to speak up to those in power. We can’t allow ourselves to get discouraged or complacent. We Japanese have kept too quiet for the past 40-50 years.”
These concerns were an important influence on his work, as exemplified by his work LIFE (1999), which combines music with footage of Hiroshima’s bombing during WWII and the famous line from the Hindu sacred text Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”) spoken by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb himself.
In tune with nature
According to Sakamoto, the world is full of sounds which we don’t normally hear as “music”. However, he adds, “the sounds are very interesting, musically. So, I have a strong desire to incorporate them into my work, mix them with instruments into one soundscape. A sonic blending that is both chaotic and unified.” Such sonic amalgamate can also take on a metaphysical dimension: “I’m fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound, one that won’t dissipate over time. I suppose in literary terms it would be like a metaphor for eternity.”
Sakamoto’s profound attunement with the natural world took him on an epic journey from recording sounds in Lake Turkana in northern Kenya (used in his song Only Love Can Conquer Hate) to “fishing the sound” of melting snow in the Arctic Circle, while making numerous other field recordings and visiting key sites like Fukushima’s restricted contamination zone.
In the end, it’s the return to a more natural state of being that seemed to appeal to Sakamoto, in sharp contrast to the unhalted, rapid technological progress. As the composer reveals: “I’m interested in the erosion of technology, such as errors or noises.” His thoughts are illuminating: “Nature is forced into shape. Interestingly, the piano requires re-tuning. We humans say it falls out of tune. But that’s not exactly accurate. Matter is struggling to return to a natural state. […] In short, the piano is tuned by force to please our ears or ideals. It’s a condition that feels natural to us humans. But from nature’s perspective, it’s very unnatural. I think deep inside me somewhere, I have a strong aversion to that.”
A truly remarkable and one-of-a-kind work of nonfiction,Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was first published in 1979, winning the Pulitzer Prize. In this overly stimulating and mind-blowing book, American scholar Douglas R. Hofstadter draws inspiration from music and mathematics to art and biology, while delving into elusive notions such as consciousness, self-reference, recursion, isomorphism, and “strange loops”, in order to investigate the deeper essence and nature of intelligence itself.
In his extensive and wide-ranging study of the inner workings of mind and cognitive processes, Hofstadter examines various properties of intelligence, such as being able to jump out of the system or breaking out of predetermined patterns. Especially appealing in Hofstadter’s approach is the way he constantly draws intriguing analogies from various fields of art in order to better illustrate complex notions and concepts.
Music, and specifically J.S. Bach’s music, is particularly prominent throughout the book as a vehicle through which Hofstadter offers many valuable insights about cognition, reasoning and creativity. “Intelligence loves patterns and balks at randomness”, he writes, while comparing Bach’s “self-contained” music with the random processes and aleatoric nature of John Cage’s works. As he puts it in a short but illuminating passage on codes and decipherment: “In form, there is content”.
In his landmark book, Hofstadter offers another beautiful analogy when he mentions “an inner tension, very much like the tension in a piece of music caused by chord progressions that let you know what the tonality is, without resolving. […] The mathematician’s sense of tension is intimately related to his sense of beauty, and is what makes mathematics worthwhile doing.” He also goes on to liken analogies to chords using the concept of an imaginary “keyboard of concepts”: superficially similar ideas – like physically close notes – are often not deeply related, whereas deeply related ideas are often superficially disparate, just like harmonically close notes are physically distant.
While discussing the cultural context and emotional appeal of music, Hofstadter wonders: “Will beings of an alien civilization have emotions? Will their emotions – supposing they have some – be mappable, in any sense, onto ours?” Questions such as this become particularly intriguing in relation to experiments like the Voyager Golden Record time capsule, a pair of two identical phonograph records included aboard the two Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977 that are still travelling through deep space carrying music from – among others – J.S. Bach.
In any case, music, as all art in general, retains its aura of mystique and sense of wonder. As Hofstadter puts it: “Do you really understand Bach because you have taken him apart? Or did you understand it that time you felt the exhilaration in every nerve of your body?”
AI, music, and creativity
In his discussion of computer-generated music, Hofstadter notes that “in most circumstances, the driving force behind such pieces is a human intellect, and the computer has been employed, with more or less ingenuity, as a tool for realizing an idea devised by the human. The program which carries this out is not anything which we can identify with. It is a simple and simple-minded piece of software with no flexibility, no perspective on what it is doing, and no sense of self.”
Indeed, as in the case of recent attempts to emulate the style of J.S. Bach with the help of ChatGPT and MIDI technology, it seems that technology is still in the service of human intellect, a tool rather than the guiding force behind the creative process. However, as technology evolves and AI becomes increasingly self-aware, Hofstadter suggests that there will come a time “to start splitting up one’s admiration: some to the programmer for creating such an amazing program, and some to the program itself for its sense of music.”
As he writes: “Creativity is the essence of that which is not mechanical. Yet every creative act is mechanical. […] Perhaps what differentiates highly creative ideas from ordinary ones is some combined sense of beauty, simplicity, and harmony.” It is exactly these qualities that will, in the long run, prove to be crucial: “AI, when it reaches the level of human intelligence – or even if it surpasses it – will still be plagued by the problems of art, beauty, and simplicity, and will run up against these things constantly in its own search for knowledge and understanding.”
The eclipse of man: A terrifying prospect
While attempting to crack the mysteries of consciousness and intelligence, Hofstadter’s penetrative analysis offers some deep revelations about our own human nature. “Contradiction is a major source of clarification and progress in all domains of life”, he argues, adding that “we all are bundles of contradictions, and we manage to hang together by bringing out only one side of ourselves at a given time.”
Moreover, the awareness of human fallibility and imperfection appears in sharp contrast to the rise of superintelligence. As Hofstadter put it in a recent interview: “It’s like a tidal wave that is washing over us in unprecedented and unimagined speeds… And, to me, it’s quite terrifying because it suggests that everything that I used to believe was the case is being overturned. […] It’s a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing. Especially when you think that human beings are soon going to be eclipsed… It feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust. Soon.”
Echoing the concerns of other important scholars and thinkers such as Geoffrey Hinton and Noam Chomsky, Hofstadter is cautious about AI-powered language models such as ChatGPT. As he wrote recently: “It makes no sense whatsoever to let the artificial voice of a chatbot, chatting randomly away at dazzling speed, replace the far slower but authentic and reflective voice of a thinking, living human being. [..] To fall for the illusion that vast computational systems “who” have never had a single experience in the real world outside of text are nevertheless perfectly reliable authorities about the world at large is a deep mistake, and, if that mistake is repeated sufficiently often and comes to be widely accepted, it will undermine the very nature of truth on which our society — and I mean all of human society —is based.”
Ever wondered how it would feel to be in a rock band during the summer of love in swinging London? Well, for those of us not around at the time, reading David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue is probably as close as we can get without having to get teleported back to Soho’s music scene in the late 1960s.
As one might expect, the novel deals extensively – yet not exclusively – with topics such as sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll (increasingly so, in this order). However, it builds and extends upon these classic themes, touching upon issues such as gender equality, (hetero)sexuality, emotional dyslexia, mental illness, perception and hallucination, the process of songwriting, as well as the inner workings of music business.
Carnaby Street, London, c. 1968 / H. Grobe
In his latest novel, Mitchell recounts the birth and rise to fame of a fictional four-piece psychedelic-folk-rock band called Utopia Avenue. As the story unfolds, the reader follows the band from their beginnings in Soho, London to their first – and final – tour of America (“an endless, world-class distraction, if nothing else”), with eventful detours in Rome and Amsterdam in between. While getting to know the the band members (and their manager), the reader stumbles upon several famous musicians and artists who interact with the band at various points throughout the book, such as Brian Jones, David Bowie, Syd Barrett, Francis Bacon, Sandy Denny, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Jerry Garcia.
Although the focus is primary musical and cultural, the novel also taps into the politics and activism of the late 1960s. Referencing anti-war demonstrations and debates about the Vietnam War, Mitchell also discusses the nature of radicalism, the demise of hippie culture, and the subsequent commercialization of anti-commercialism.
Still, Utopia Avenue is largely a novel about the mystifying power of music and its ability to enrich, transform and make sense of one’s life. To quote Jasper, the band’s troubled yet supremely gifted guitarist: “How music works is learnable. Why it works, God only knows. Maybe not even God.” While playing in Paradiso, Amsterdam’s hallowed venue, Jasper comes to a realization: “Worship still happens here, worship of music itself. Music frees the soul from the cage of the body. Music transforms the Many to a One.”
Paradiso, Amsterdam, 1979 / Hans van Dijk for Anefo
So can music actually change the world? The answer, once more, is given by Jasper: “Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they’ll land? Or what they’ll bring? […] Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don’t take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this.”
From cover to cover, Utopia Avenue is an immense joy to read. Its pages are sure to captivate music enthusiasts, as well as anyone with even a passing interest in the cultural and social upheaval of the late 1960s. An ideal companion would be Joe Boyd’s memoir White Bicycles, which Mitchell also cites as an inspiration. And while you’re at it, you might also want to check out this cool playlist inspired by the novel. Enjoy the ride!
Over the last year or so, I have been listening a lot to the discography of Miles Davis, while studying and trying to play some of his music. During this time I also read Miles: The Autobiography, a book full of provocative and stimulating thoughts about music and his tumultuous life.
Here are some key takeaways that can serve as both guides for aspiring musicians, as well as general life lessons:
Lesson 1: Knowledge is freedom
For Miles, there is no point in having access to knowledge if you don’t take advantage of it. As he puts it:
¨A lot of the old guys thought that if you learned something from theory, then you would lose the feeling in your playing. I would go to the library and borrow scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music.¨
Lesson 2: Music is about style
It his book, Miles acknowledges his influences from a very broad (and often extra-musical) cultural spectrum. ¨If I were to play with Frank Sinatra¨, he says, ¨I would play the way he sings, or do something complementary to the way he sings. I learned a lot about phrasing listening to the way Frank, Nat King Cole, and even Orson Welles phrased. I mean all those people are motherfuckers in the way they shape a musical line or sentence or phrase with their voice.¨
And when it comes to blues in particular: “If you play the blues you just have to play a feeling; you have to feel it.” Like much of Miles’s playing, his advice sounds deceivingly simple.
Lesson 3: There are no ”wrong” sounds
A famous Miles Davis quote is that ¨there are no wrong notes in jazz.¨ A profound insight into his overall approach to music, this is a concept that, for all its clarity and simplicity, remains exceedingly difficult to fully realize and apply creatively.
As he puts it in his autobiography:
¨Nothing in music and sounds is ”wrong.” You can hit anything, any kind of chord. Music is wide open for anything.¨
Lesson 4: Technology is not -necessarily- evil
On the issue of technological innovation in relation to music making, Miles is pretty clear: it’s not technology itself that causes trouble, but rather how it’s being put into use by the musicians themselves. As he writes:
¨Musicians have to play the instruments that best reflect the times we’re in, play the technology that will give you what you want to hear. All these purists are walking around talking about how electrical instruments will destroy music. Bad music is what will ruin music, not the instruments musicians choose to play.¨
Miles Dewey Davis III (1926-1991)
Lesson 5: It’s all about change
If anything, Miles’s entire career and life in music is a perfect example of constant evolution, experimentation and adaptation. In a nutshell: a prime example of constant change.
In his own words:
¨If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change. Living is an adventure and a challenge.¨
The Muser 