“My conception of music isn’t based on day-to-day time,” Ryuichi Sakamoto tells an interviewer early in Elizabeth Lennard’s 1984 documentary Tokyo Melody. “In Japan, where music is everywhere, what we might call universal time continues to exist on the same basis as our day-to-day time.” The dialectical implications of that claim move in two directions. […]

This post was originally published on Jacobin.