Ryuichi Sakamoto, one installation at a time
The order to walk five sound installations in, and what each one is actually doing to you
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Sakamoto spent the 2000s building sound you walk through instead of sound you sit and listen to. Slow down at each piece — these installations reward standing still far more than they reward moving on.
The museum leads with this piece in its own description, and it's the one work confirmed to anchor the show: a piano damaged in the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami, its keys triggered by real-time seismological data from earthquakes worldwide. In its Tokyo staging the piano sat in a shallow pool under an overhead video of falling snow — expect something close to that in Berlin, though the exact staging wasn't public before opening. Don't rush it. The notes come slowly, with long silences between.
Several works grow out of Sakamoto's 2017 album async, made with Shiro Takatani and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Elsewhere, this team has staged async material as sound placed in three dimensions around the room rather than aimed at you from one direction — what Sakamoto called "installed music." Walk the perimeter before you walk the centre.
Two films use music from 12, the sonic diary Sakamoto recorded in 2021 and 2022 while undergoing treatment for the cancer that killed him in March 2023. It was his final album. Coming after the earlier rooms, the shift from installed sound to film changes the pace on purpose — let it.
The museum stays open until 20:00 on Thursdays, and visitors at Hamburger Bahnhof consistently report the galleries thinning after six — useful for sound work where other people's footsteps compete with the piece.
16:00–20:00, funded by Volkswagen's Art4All programme. Busier than a paid evening, but the building absorbs it. Confirm on the museum's Art4All page near your date.
Backpacks aren't allowed inside, and like every SMB museum the building closes on Mondays. Saturday and Sunday open at 11:00, not 10:00.
The €16 day ticket also covers Shilpa Gupta's What Still Holds and the CHANEL-commissioned Lina Lapelytė sound piece, both running the same weeks Sakamoto opens. Plan a half day, not an hour.
Why it matters: The exhibition's confirmed centrepiece: a piano rescued from a tsunami-damaged school in Miyagi Prefecture, played by computer-controlled fingers triggered by seismic data. Sakamoto called it a piano "tuned by nature."
What to notice: The gaps between notes. The piano doesn't perform a melody, it responds to real earthquakes happening as you stand there — the silence is the instrument thinking, not a pause in a score.
Why it matters: Grown from Sakamoto's 2017 album, developed with two long-time collaborators into what he called "installed music" — sound built to surround a room rather than face an audience.
What to notice: Where the sound is actually coming from. Resist the instinct to face forward. The speakers are placed to be walked between, not watched.
Why it matters: Uses music from 12, the sonic diary Sakamoto recorded in 2021–22, his final album before his death in March 2023.
What to notice: The pace change. After three rooms of ambient, non-narrative sound, film introduces time that moves in one direction — notice how much more conventional it feels by comparison.
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