Ryuichi Sakamoto, 12

Sakamoto's all-star blend of Western and Eastern music styles is a triumphant success for the composer, and a consistently good listen. On the title track he takes a traditional Japanese folk song and blends it into a funk groove provided by Bootsy Collins, Bill Laswell, and Sly Dunbar. Unlike Byrne and Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, this blend of cultures is coming from the opposing angle and stays truer to the source material. But that track is only one of Sakamoto's approaches, and on several other tracks he joins with Laswell to create a crisp, techno-cultural hybrid that sounds like nothing except like pure Sakamoto. On "Risky," a subdued Iggy Pop lends vocals and lyrics, and doesn't come across as an interloper. And on "Okinawa Song," Sakamoto seamlessly integrates the southern island culture into his grand scheme.

音楽図鑑 = Ongaku Zukan [Music Encyclopedia]. Slightly different to later international release "Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia".

Twenty years after its original release, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s minimalist masterpiece returns on NOTON on May 27, 2022.

Depending on your viewpoint, director Brian De Palma has been frequently lauded/taken to task for liberally appropriating the stylistic flourishes of other directors. And if De Palma's biggest "inspiration" on Snake Eyes is Alfred Hitchcock, the director found an admirable, if unlikely, semblance of frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann in Ryuichi Sakamoto. Though better known for more delicate, electronic, and ethnically tinged work, here Sakamoto does a truly amazing Benny impression, cranking up the brass and swirling the strings into an unsettling sonic maelstrom that would've done late '50s Hitch proud. Meredith Brooks and LaKiesha Berry also contribute a pair of songs in the contemporary pop vein that the kids seem to like so much.

Due likely to his other careers as a pop artist, producer, classical composer, actor, and fashion model, Ryuichi Sakamoto the film scorer has averaged less than one film a year since his delightfully melodic debut, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence in 1983. But the Academy Award winner (The Last Emperor) has clearly eschewed quantity for quality, and his often-chilling music for Love Is the Devil (the first feature by vidoegrapher John Maybury–a disturbing portrait of artist Francis Bacon and his dark, obsessive relationship with his model/lover, George Dyer) is no exception. Sakamoto has long resisted composing mere musical narration for his film assignments; here he gets inside the characters by using the diverse palette and electronic techniques gleaned from his often cutting-edge pop work. This masterful melange of samples, treated piano, electronics, and white noise plays like a modern horror masterpiece, an eerie techno-concerto that owes more to Sakamoto's days as a student of electronic music and the avant-garde than to his sunny turn as leader of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Think Bernard Herrmann displaced by an ocean and half-a-century of technology.