Aesthetics of Impermanence: Ryuichi Sakamoto's Async and Coda through Desmond's Otherness and Schopenhauer's Will

This paper explores the sonic framing of our being-towards-death and the ontological scarcity of the singular moment in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2017 album async and its companion documentary Coda, in which he fundamentally transforms his approach to sound and time. Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster and a cancer diagnosis, Sakamoto abandoned the strict mathematical control and synthesizer mastery that defined his early electronic music and instead shifted towards a sound of natural decay and environmental noise. This paper interprets Sakamoto’s aesthetic evolution as a direct challenge to Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music. While Schopenhauer argued that aesthetic contemplation offers a necessary and temporary escape from the inherent suffering of the world (the Will), Sakamoto’s async refuses to adhere to this aesthetic quietism by forcing the listener to dwell within the world's materiality. Drawing also on William Desmond’s concept of the metaxu, the intermediate space where the self and the “Other" meet, I argue that Sakamoto turns the reality of physical decay into a relationship of radical receptivity toward the world and provides the ground for an aesthetic encounter. By embracing the instrument’s decay as an active expression of its own impermanence, and by allowing notes to naturally fade into the environment, and giving them the space and time to exist, async radically reframes mortality and the fleeting nature of sound. Rather than approaching entropy, death and decay as tragic phenomena that necessitate control or resolution through artistic intervention, Sakamoto affirms impermanence as a fundamental gift that opens the listener up to the porosity of being.