async–first light is a collaboration with Apichatpong from Sakamoto's album async.

People at a film screening, the sea, the view of a country road from a car, a sleeping child, an adult, a dog... Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul interpreted Sakamoto's album async as a personal work and asked people close to him to shoot footage using his pocket-sized Digital Harinezumi camera. The images that the camera captured are snippets of people's personal and everyday moments rendered in grainy, low resolution, with uniquely warm colors.

After receiving a request to collaborate with Sakamoto on async, which was in production at the time, Weerasethakul spent much of his time listening to the music that was sent to him. He finally decided on using the two tracks, disintegration and LIFE, LIFE, and requested that Sakamoto change their lengths and arrange the transition from one composition to the next to suit the needs of the video. Deconstructed fragments of scenes appear to the sounds in disintegration, switching from one moment to another sometimes as if in repetition. Gradually, the music shifts to LIFE, LIFE, as the poem "And this I dreamt, and this I dream" by Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky is quietly heard against images of people going to sleep.

Weerasethakul describes Sakamoto's music as very “refreshing” and that it gave him the feeling of encountering the sounds of nature for the first time. He says, "It's like when one opens his or her eyes in the morning and remembers the first light, first image that one sees. Imprinted.”