It sounds very high-tech. ‘Kagami’ is an augmented reality piano concert from the great Japanese musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died last year.
Recorded towards the end of his life, and created by AR specialists Tin Drum, it sees the audience don headsets to watch the recital, which then appears to be happening live in the middle of the Roundhouse’s yawning performance space.
It’s a futuristic conceit. And yet, next to what I suppose is the most obvious comparison, ‘ABBA Voyage’, it feels low-tech, analogue even.
Neither Sakamoto nor his piano exactly look real. Viewed through the headset, he exists in 3D, but the closer you get to him – you’re allowed to walk around the space – the more crudely drawn and artificial he looks.
It’s a disconcerting experience, like something out of a retro sci-fi. He only passed away in March last year, but the recording of him feels strangely ancient – you can imagine explorers in the future entering the lounge of some derelict spaceship and flipping on the still-functioning holopianist and there he is.
His repertoire is wintry solo piano, enhanced by AI effects - plumes of smoke or blossom that hangs in the air - and he says little, his avatar briefly disappearing between songs like each tune is being cued up on a jukebox.
This might be a ‘me’ problem, but I struggled not to view the entire thing in incredibly existential terms, the idea that I was on some level witnessing somebody’s afterlife, that this same concert might be viewed again centuries from now. Maybe this is overthinking it: certainly there will be people who just view it as a cool AR concert and leave it at that.
After a fair amount of acclimatisation, however, it all clicked into place. Partly it’s getting used to the music: I’ve enjoyed some of Sakamoto’s soundtracks and his work with electronic pioneers the Yellow Magic Orchestra, but ‘Kagami’ is built around stately, austere piano. But it warms up: his 1999 Japanese smash ‘Energy Flow’ is the first song to be accompanied with a snippet of talking, as he drily explains how surprised he was that it was a hit, and also the first truly stunning piece of visuals, as a sort of portal to a winter landscape opens in the air, leaking snow into the room.
A few more of his greatest hits help warm the atmosphere as well - the lush, haunting synth theme to 1983’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mister Lawrence’ is stripped down instrumentally here but has a richness and warmth the early stages are lacking. The more enjoyable the concert becomes as a concert, the less ‘Kagami’ feels like an existential puzzle that needs to be solved to be enjoyed. But it remains complex and disconcerting – certainly never do you feel you’re simply watching a guy play piano for 50 minutes.
The final track is ‘BB’, a short, mournful piece which Sakamoto explains – in his second and final audience address – he wrote in response to the death of his old friend Bernardo Bertolucci (the Italian director whose 1987 film ‘The Last Emperor’ won Sakomoto an Academy Award for Best Original Score). ‘Kagami’ ends, then, with a song explicitly about death, performed by a recording of a dead man who knew he was dying. At its conclusion Sakomoto hunches over his piano, staring directly down at the keys, either an emotionally exhausted human or a deactivated simulacrum… or a little of both. It’s the most overtly theatrical moment of the show, and the most powerful.
There is a semi-apologetic introduction from Tin Drum that says the show won’t be perfect but they’ve done their best. It’s there to pre-empt the odd glitch in the headsets, but I think it’s a helpful note generally: ‘Kagami’s imperfections lend it strength. It’s neither a glossy concert nor a digital memorial, but something haunting that exists in between.