by Aidin Vaziri

He's won an Academy Award, starred in a Madonna video and, back in the day, invented technopop. But who is this stylistic chameleon called Ryuichi Sakamoto?

Last year he composed and performed the original score for Oliver Stone's television mini-series "Wild Palms," reformed Yellow Magic Orchestra for a new CD and two sold-out shows at one of Japan's biggest stadiums, made a cameo appearance in Madonna's "Rain" video, wrote and conducted the original score for Bernardo Bertolucci's film "Little Buddha" and started work on his latest solo album and Elektra Records debut. And that was a relatively slow twelve months.

Yet to the uninitiated, Ryuichi Sakamoto still remains a bit of an enigma. His name may be linked with many great things, but no one can quite place the man. "It seems that a lot of people have my image from some movies," says Sakamoto, in his carefully measured, slightly fragmented English, "as an actor in 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence' and as a composer for 'The Last Emperor' [for which he scored an Academy Award]. They are bigger sources for people than Yellow Magic Orchestra. People seem to forget that band, but that's okay."

It's only natural for a man as prolific as Sakamoto to suffer from a persistent identity crisis. His résumé is an erratic catalogue of production gigs, movie scores, experimental solo projects, odd collaborations and, of course, the occasional starring role in a major motion picture alongside David Bowie. "My new dream is to write an opera," says the restless 42-year old Tokyo-born New York transplant. "But that can be done even when I get to be 60 or 70 years old." Currently he's too busy chasing less overwhelming fantasies like organizing the world's first truly multicultural orchestra. "It's still one of my dreams," he smiles, "to have an orchestra of Indian tabula's going on with Mahler's 'Adagio Movement.' Something like that would be beautiful."

What people tend to overlook with Sakamoto, however, is his well-versed verve in modern music. Not only did he play a crucial role in one the of world's first entirely electronically oriented bands YMO ("We invented technopop") back in the late '70s, but has followed and capitalized on popular trends ever since with a keen sense of accelerating them. His last solo album, 1992's Heartbeat, brought together artists as diverse as Dmitry Brill and Towa Tei of Deee-Lite, Ingrid Chavez and David Sylvian in a seamless milieu of house grooves, world music fundamentals and thumping beats. His latest disc, Sweet Revenge follows the same concourse set forth by its predecessor, again upping the ante.

"For Heartbeat I was starting to write music from drum beats," Sakamoto explains. "So I would pick up some good grooves and then add some other parts-chords, bass parts, keyboards. So Heartbeat was very beat oriented. But this time I started writing melodies first. I really wanted to write songs. Then I carefully listened to those melodies and the tracks told me what they needed as far as instrumentation, grooves, vocalist "you know, the whole arrangement. So the two albums are very different because I wanted to present something very opposite to the pop field. As you know, either hip hop or grunge, they are sweetless-very radical, almost no melodies, no chords sometimes. Sweet Revenge has melodies, sweet chords, the feeling of melancholy sentiment. I wanted to bring songwriting back to pop music. It's been missing for a long time. That's the revenge."

But while Sweet Revenge is more ripe than its predecessor, it hardly represents a softened Sakamoto. It does, in fact, showcase the composer's natural deftness at creating indispensable soundscapes. Driven by a wonderfully seductive clamor, the album soars with laid-back grooves and a saucy pulse reminiscent of Vol. II-era Soul II Soul. The album's title track-vast and threadbare-offers up a dramatic air not unlike one of Sakamoto's movie scores. And "Sentimental" breezes by with a slightly bossa nova-ish, '60s French movie feel and features an exquisite vocal by Vivian Sessoms. The album's glittering stars, however, are the tracks that feature J-Me and Latasha Natasha Diggs, whose extraordinary, sensual voices combined with Sakamoto's sultry grooves make for orgasmic results.

"By chance I was invited to join an event by Arto Lindsay here in New York downtown at the Knitting Factory," says Sakamoto. "Arto invited a lot of different people-Laurie Anderson to read some of her stuff, and William Burroughs talked on the phone to the audience, and Smash, he's a DJ, and J-Me, Natasha and I was there also. First time I heard J-Me's performance she talked by herself without any beats and she had very great grooves. The words are very different from any other hip hop stuff also. It was almost like poetry. It was very fresh and very unique, very new. Around that time, I had just started writing Sweet Revenge and thought that she would be perfect."

Such abandon willingness to probe modern sources for his rather conventional craft is nothing new to Sakamoto. It is the credo he has lived by throughout his career. Sweet Revenge again ventures into surreal territory, enlisting a cast as varied as Deee-Lite's Towa Tei, Holly Johnson and even Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera. "One difficulty is my music is not easy for on-air," Sakamoto admits. "Not many radio stations want to play my music." But then again it could have something to do with his peculiar refusal to get in where he fits in. "The interesting point is hip hop uses a lot of samples taken from '60s, '70s records," Sakamoto says, "and they were not very well recorded compared to the new recordings in modern days. And French movie soundtracks have a similar timbre. I call it lo-fi. Modern recordings are hi-fi, and everybody is looking for hi-fi technology. But hip hop guys and I somehow want more lo-fi sounding music. I know there are people that like my music, but I don't want to be Michael Jackson."