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However, its re-issue here, the first on vinyl since the 1976 original, is very welcome, and highlights both his versatility and, at the same time, the breadth of his musical interests, from modern classical (as an undergraduate, he paid close attention to the likes of Stockhausen) to what would become known, not very satisfactorily, as world music reflecting his postgraduate studies in ethno-musicology. There’s also more than an echo of his enthusiasm for such jazz figures as Herbie Hancock. In the context of his role in the growth of electronic music (early Kraftwerk is contemporaneous, and comparisons are sometimes, but not always, helpful), it is possible to see this first record as a highly adventurous mix (or even collision!) of genres.
Over the following decades, his most well-known compositions were found in film scores. He won an Oscar in 1988 for The Last Emperor, though for many in Japan and in the West, his finest work was in the world of electronica that was so influential in the development of synth-pop. Later, into the 1990s and 2000s, he recorded some fine solo piano and ambient pieces, further extending his remarkable range.
Returning now to that first release, there is a persuasive argument that what we have here is an ambitious, radical set of compositions, not all equally successful, but nevertheless containing a startling combination of so many ideas that, belatedly, deserve greater recognition and appreciation now than they received fifty years ago. The finest passages have vigour and dynamism and, despite being improvised, are structurally coherent, appropriate for an album named after two places that are far apart in distance yet are also longitudinally aligned.
Side A has a single twenty-minute track, “Aya”, with furious interplay between the two musicians that highlights Tsuchitori’s immersion in the rhythms of African drums as well as in the New York free jazz scene, and Sakamoto’s careful study of Balinese gamelan (and its profound influence on Debussy). As the pace slows, the delicacy of Sakamoto’s playing becomes clear, before an outstanding extended percussive passage from Tsuchitori and then a resumption of the cross-cutting between (among other instruments) piano, bells, drums and cymbals.
After this frenetic “Aya”, Side B opens with the more ambient “Utsuwa no naka”, with intermittent electronica glitches along with the more traditional gong and glockenspiel. It’s a beautiful contrast to the energy of “Aya” and, indeed, the subsequent two tracks, “Musique Differencielle 1°” and “Musique Differencielle 2°” develop along more familiar Eastern patterns of sound that, nevertheless, incorporate some effectively jagged sonics and rhythms more suggestive of aspects of Western Modernism that one hears in the work of some post-War composers such as Ligeti.
Clearly, this is an album of interest in considering specifically the career of Sakamoto. Yet, it is more than this, in that it reminds us of a time when such experimental electronica generally was in its formative stage, and points towards what it was to become in itself and what it was to contribute to in subsequent years.
English (US) · 