Country: Japan
Artist: Male solo artist
Career: recording solo since 1978
Language: Instrumental / English
Genre: Orchestral soundtrack
It’s not easy to determine the release year of records in Sakamoto’s vast body of work. Some of them are released in Asia earlier than in the rest of the world, or only released in certain parts of the world… Like this one, which AllMusic claims for 2000 and which I found reviewed in the European press in that year, but the copyright date is 1999. I’ll claim it for the year I’m covering here, just because Sakamoto is one of my best discoveries of this project. Sure, I knew ‘Forbidden colours’, his wonderful song with David Sylvian – which is on this record in a beautiful piano, singer and orchestra version -, and I’d heard bits and pieces here and there. I knew his name cropped up in a lot of places But now I find he could be one of the great polymath composer / producer / guest musician / artists in the line of John Cale and Van Dyke Parks and Jim O’Rourke (or O’Rourke would be in line with him, as he showed up later). My new hero.
This record came out on Sony Classical, if you want to put a label on it. It contains 4 soundtrack pieces (one vocal, ‘Forbidden colours’ with Sylvian singing, and three instrumentals from the movies ‘The last emperor’, ‘Little Buddha’ and ‘Wuthering heights’ - I’m not sure if they’re existing sections or newly composed combinations of melodies from those movies) and 2 other compositions (‘Replica’, the oldest and most ‘modern’ –meaning, repetitive - music here, and ‘El Mar Mediterrani’, written for the Olympics in Barcelona).
On the first two tracks the orchestra is guided by Sakamoto’s piano, and it’s a good decision to put these tracks first – his piano is also a great guide for the listener. In his playing you hear the most concise yet complete blueprint for his compositions, the way he builds up melody and develops his themes. The clear lines and structure in his work are just beautiful – Sakamoto is a very economical writer, no endless mazes of compositional knot, you can be damn sure he’s going somewhere in a straight line. Of course the structure wouldn’t mean anything without the base material, the melodies. And man, he’s great at those too. From ‘Forbidden colours’ which you probably all know, into the drama of ‘The last emperor’ and the contemplative, elongated notes of ‘Little Buddha’ and onwards into the longing, pastoral ‘Wuthering heights’ (which, by the way, opens up into a breathtaking passage at around 4’30”), the abstract repetition of ‘Replica’, and finally the 15 minute voyage of ‘El Mar Mediterrani’.
The liner notes can’t resist the temptation of comparing this to a score of classical composers: Debussy and Satie, Stravinsky and Messiaen (all mentioned – I wouldn’t want to be caught in the crossfires between the four, but it’s apparently a good thing). The adjective that keeps popping up in my mind to describe this album (and the final epic most of all) is ‘evocative’. But not evocative of things we can see, either in reality or in the mind’s eye. I’ve never seen any of these movies, and frankly I don’t want to anymore, the chance I’d like it as much as the music is very small, and I don’t want to constrain the way the music ignites my imagination with visual cues of any kind. It’s not evocative of rolling grasslands, or mountain scales, or submarine adventures. But it is evocative, of a country made entirely of music, a world that only exists by ear, where you can live inside the way the orchestra strikes up a chord.
At its best: Forbidden colours, Wuthering heights, El Mar Mediterrani
On the first two tracks the orchestra is guided by Sakamoto’s piano, and it’s a good decision to put these tracks first – his piano is also a great guide for the listener. In his playing you hear the most concise yet complete blueprint for his compositions, the way he builds up melody and develops his themes. The clear lines and structure in his work are just beautiful – Sakamoto is a very economical writer, no endless mazes of compositional knot, you can be damn sure he’s going somewhere in a straight line. Of course the structure wouldn’t mean anything without the base material, the melodies. And man, he’s great at those too. From ‘Forbidden colours’ which you probably all know, into the drama of ‘The last emperor’ and the contemplative, elongated notes of ‘Little Buddha’ and onwards into the longing, pastoral ‘Wuthering heights’ (which, by the way, opens up into a breathtaking passage at around 4’30”), the abstract repetition of ‘Replica’, and finally the 15 minute voyage of ‘El Mar Mediterrani’.
The liner notes can’t resist the temptation of comparing this to a score of classical composers: Debussy and Satie, Stravinsky and Messiaen (all mentioned – I wouldn’t want to be caught in the crossfires between the four, but it’s apparently a good thing). The adjective that keeps popping up in my mind to describe this album (and the final epic most of all) is ‘evocative’. But not evocative of things we can see, either in reality or in the mind’s eye. I’ve never seen any of these movies, and frankly I don’t want to anymore, the chance I’d like it as much as the music is very small, and I don’t want to constrain the way the music ignites my imagination with visual cues of any kind. It’s not evocative of rolling grasslands, or mountain scales, or submarine adventures. But it is evocative, of a country made entirely of music, a world that only exists by ear, where you can live inside the way the orchestra strikes up a chord.
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