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Rating:
What Mr. Sakamoto excels at magnificently is crafting soundscapes.
Born as the firstborn of the dragon [龍一], raised in the robotic fascination of the Japanese style — better known as YMO — and matured in composing delicate and timeless soundtracks, in 1986, at the age of 34, Sakamoto was on his sixth solo album: he had already composed, among other things, the Nippo-Western kaleidoscope “Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia” [音楽図鑑], the electronic gem B-2 Unit and the soundtrack of the (admittedly mediocre) film “Furyo [俘虜] / Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, releasing the famous “Forbidden Colours”, a paradigmatic example of the long-standing Sakamoto/Sylvian collaboration.
Sakamoto's fascination with synthetic and frosted sound, refined with his companions of the Yellow Magic Orchestra (Hosono and Takahashi, whose varied solo productions I highly recommend you listen to), is here revisited not without some short-circuits: to the MIDI imagery of the Japanese video game — one might say “to the pachinko style” —, Sakamoto replaces the more fantasized than real imagery of early 20th-century futurism. To the Kraftwerk universe, he substitutes, while remaining in the same coordinates, the universe of speed: see the cover in which Sakamoto echoes Balla's dachshund (“Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash” from 1912).
Alternating crackling samples of Marinetti + obsessive beats (in “Variety Show”) to proto-IDM (“Daikokai”) or funky, guitar slashes and synthetic voices (“Ballet Mechanique”), Sakamoto still manages to give, as usual, a unified tone to the album. Not that the overly-used label of concept album suits it. It seems rather that the idea should be understood the other way around, as Mr. Sakamoto's excuse to draw from a reservoir of ideas, such as the pseudo-futurism, to make something personal out of it. In 1986 it was the turn of futurism, while for example, in 2017 it was (with “async”) the imagined cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. In 1999 instead, to name one, it was the turn (with “BTTB”) of Erik Satie.
While immediately denoting its belonging to its years (the '80s), this work is first and foremost a handbook of Sakamoto's way of composing/juxtaposing: constructing, around a filtered, chewed, and digested theme in the first person, a sort of sonic melieu, in which nonetheless the coordinates of Sakamoto are recognizable: Japan and the West.
P.S. I'm not adding stars because I find it senseless to rate music.
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