Ryuichi Sakamoto
B-2 Unit

- two and a half ounces of biscuits

- an ounce of jam

- half an ounce of sugar

- a quarter of an ounce of instant coffee

This is the content of the B-2 Unit, a ration packed in a tin can by the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company of Chicago and distributed to the American army in 1941. It seems little, but it is not.

“B-2 Unit”, much like the homonymous tin can, is a vademecum of what it is designed for. Indeed, if a frugal breakfast fits all in a jar, the essence of electronics fits all in half an hour of LP.

Published in 1980, the year when YMO was, despite the notable smoothness of the sound, increasingly following its natural penchant for pop with the release of “X∞Multiplies”, Sakamoto found himself at a crossroads: if in the project of the yellow Japanese orchestra there was simultaneously both the push towards the direction the trio eventually took and the opposite one, towards the bare and raw electronic dissonance, there was nothing left to do but take this latter path to map out his possibilities. This path, taken, traversed, and concluded entirely in eight tracks, remains — like a hidden river — present here and there in his entire production, like that touch of instrumental electric screeching placed, without any scruple, amidst distinctly synth-pop songs, until it becomes distinctly visible again, nobly aged as if in an oak barrel, in Sakamoto's hopefully not-final testament: “async”.

Not for nothing, if “a-sync”, lack of sync, rethinks from scratch that “Differencia” (the first track of “B-2 Unit”, and the provisional title of the album), that — at a distance of 37 years — represents the weight of a part of his compositional balance both yesterday and today, it is first and foremost and mostly in the 1980 album that we find the weight itself in purity, without which Sakamoto would no longer be Sakamoto, but a mere creator of little tunes.

This hard core of electronics, perhaps marred only by the addition in “Thatness and Thereness” (upon advice from Mitaka Goto) of a vocal line, which makes the origin of the nippo-pop (‘80s) of the album more recognizable, could be easily compared (and it has always been, citing "B-2 Unit") to the numerous developments of electronics, starting especially from the following decade. But it is not a question here of identifying pioneers or forerunners — those who listen to Kraftwerk only because they are forerunners evidently do not please me — rather, it is about considering a fact: if “Riot in Lagos” resembles IDM or Richard D. James, or if “Participation Mystique” seems composed by Drexciya, it is not because they have drawn from the pioneer of the hour, to be hailed and placed at the top of the charts, but rather because both the one and the others are victims of the same fascination: that for the space that, in purely synthetic sound, opens up between music and noise.

P.S. I don't give stars because I find it pointless to grade music.