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“They’ll try and bring me back,” he says, shaking his head. While his bandmates Hosono and Takahashi have revisited their past work over the years, Sakamoto is here in a present of his own making. You shouldn’t expect, in other words, to see a full-blown YMO reunion tour or boxset reissue of the band, no matter the evidence of internal and external pressures to do so.

And to understand this quality of the 67-year-old’s approach in the present day is to understand that the underground deification of his past catalogue, that of crate-diggers and DJs in pursuit of J-Pop esoteria by Sakamoto and his peers, is taking place beyond his own will to comprehend it. This much is evident by his chain-link sequence of collaborations, soundtracks, artistic installations, commissions, and the occasional fashion modelling appearance, that are connected with no fixed ending. Sakamoto speaks with a measured hesitancy that borders on discomfort, but in his utterances it’s clear that the composer is more content to move through the world as a realm for new possibilities, than to retread past journeys. Framed records line the hallway – one announces the platinum sales status of Travis Scott’s Astroworld – and on the wall above us, there’s a black-and-white print of Jimi Hendrix, wailing as he strikes out a chord. €œI was holding myself back,” Sakamoto says of the impromptu performance today. We’re sitting in a small, airless room adjacent to a recording studio in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood, where the composer has been finalising mixes for a score to a new short film by the director Luca Guadagnino. It was the first time in six years that the trio, one of Japan’s cult musical exports, had played a song together in front of paying audience. A video of the performance shows Sakamoto tentatively stabbing out the chord progressions with one hand as he stands in front of a Nord keyboard. Last summer, Sakamoto, along with former bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi, shocked the audience at London’s Barbican Theatre when they joined YMO’s founder, Haroumi Hosono, onstage to play a sedated version of the song as a surprise encore.

The song in question turns out to be “ Absolute Ego Dance”, a tight, lurching groove from 1979’s Solid State Survivor, Yellow Magic Orchestra’s second album.

“There are many songs,” Sakamoto says to me, almost apologetically. Sakamoto’s assistant, who is standing nearby, begins searching on his own phone, offering up song titles. He can’t find it, and his frustration is evident. Ryuichi Sakamoto is bent over, swiping through the Discogs page of Yellow Magic Orchestra, in search of the name of a song he’d written long ago.