Country: Japan
Artist: Male solo artist
Career: recording solo since 1978
Language: Instrumental
Genre: Piano recital
I told you Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of my discoveries of the year. So I’m also claiming this piano solo album, ‘Back to the basic’, for 2000, even though, just like ‘Cinemage’, it’s a 1999 Asian release but available in Europe and America from 2000.
Some records, they hit you the first time you hear ‘em. There’s something intangible about their beauty, something you can’t exactly locate, and it makes you think it could be fleeting, so you pace yourself, it’s a record for special moments, you don’t want to wear out its magic dust. This is that kind of record. I remember the first time I heard it (and there are very few records I remember stuff like that about – I have better things to do). The country was snowed in. I was standing at the railroad station amidst a sea of people, all trying to get home, looking at the screens telling us about the dreaded train delays. I could only hear snatches of the piano through the buzz of the crowd and the trains (not my train, than was a long way off). The first track, ‘Energy flow’, its perfectly proportioned beauty, I felt like I was in the eye at the center of the crowd, where time was standing still. It was a moment of complete peace. Then ‘ Put your hands up’, the second track, began, with its echoes of the verse of ‘Can’t help falling in love’, and my heart crumbled like wet cookie dough, dripping on the floor in thick, sticky sugary goo.
And so the record goes on. There is so much to hear in these miniature pieces, whatever you want to hear in them actually. Let me tell you just one more thing I heard in another beautiful - I can’t say this enough, the record is illuminated by absolute classical beauty - track called ‘Aqua’. The melody reminds me of a fragment of ‘Grapefruit moon’ by Tom Waits. Sakamoto lets the melody repeat endlessly but each time he puts in a little melodic variation, one extra note, one note less, a little run into an accent, a melody reversed… It’s those variations that pull you in, each one illuminating the one preceding and predicting the next one, and all of them together making up the definitive melody of the song – but that one can only be heard in your memory of the song. Listening it made me think of love in long-term relationships, of the repetitive nature of living together, all the little day-to-day household routines, leaving for work, dropping the kids off at school… Every day is not the same, but you go through the same routines. Yet every day there’s a little variation in routine, and all of them together are not meaningless but make up love, at least as much as the unique things you do. Thinking about it, it just melts your heart. Sentimental, I know, but there you go…
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