AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
![]() There’s the quiet respite of a sojourn in the woods expressed through a field recording of Sakamoto slowly walking over crunching leaves while the haunting flow of elongated melodies wave under the surface. The majority of async is focused on its soothing qualities. That may be hard to jibe with the lush compositions that make up the majority of the album, but what Sakamoto is attempting to do is reflect the world back on itself, an never ending pendulum swing between solace and chaos. “disintegration” finds him plucking and plonking on a piano that was damaged during the 2011 tsunami, underpinned by warm blooms of ambient synth, while “tri” takes a symphony of triangle sounds, pixelating them ever so gently at the edges for a weirdly unsettling effect. What Sakamoto emphasizes in his understated way is how to find the magic in dissonance and harmony. ![]() The tracks on async are more often gentle sighs of relief suffused with a reawakened wonderment at the beauty of simple sounds created by man made instruments and the natural world. But unlike other expressions of mortality like David Bowie’s Blackstar or Touché Amore’s Stage Four, Sakamoto isn’t raging against the dying of the light. While he’s in complete remission now, the experience of that prognosis and the possibility of not surviving it naturally shades every moment of this blindingly great record. Async, the 16th studio album from Ryuichi Sakamoto, was written and conceived in the wake of the Japanese composer/songwriter’s diagnosis and treatment for throat cancer. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |