The pair’s 2018 concert at the Sydney Opera House forms the basis of this record (not the whole thing, mind - their performance ran to two hours and had to be edited down). The duo’s new album Two acts as a celebration of Noto & Sakamoto’s artistic legacy - both of their previous work and also of the musical understanding that they have built up down the years. So carefully reduced to such elemental causes, the reconciliation of these opposing qualities – signed off, so to speak, with the enchanting flourish of Forbidden Colours – was a privilege to witness.Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) & Ryuichi Sakamoto have been playing together for many years now - their first collaborative LP, Vrioon, dates from 2002. What you got was a compelling, architecturally assured abutment of opposites: at times an almost sub-sonic bass and the most icicle-like, Ravelesque shimmerings of piano chords the bumps, clicks and pulses of white noise, underpinning what could have been the excised notes from a deconstructed keyboard study acoustic resonance and digital urgency, human reverie and technological sleeplessness of the desire for resolution and the condition of disruption. With the soundscape of the music described on a rectilinear screen, translated into shifting patterns of minimal, topographic visual accompaniment, the intense partnership between Sakamoto’s refined romanticism and Alva Noto’s simultaneously deft and deferential electronic interventions, was as thrilling to witness as a virtuoso tightrope walk, and, ultimately, as emotionally pulverising. The effect was at once monolithic and playful – its unashamed, filmic plangency allowed to both subsume and retrospectively adorn the cumulative structure of the preceding pieces. It was with an audible gasp of recognition and delight, therefore, that the capacity audience for Sakamoto and Alva Noto’s Insen performance recognized the meticulously re-assembled notes of this iconic refrain, as they were drawn together with consumate poise, as though from nowhere, towards the closing moments of this 90 minute concert. Lawrence (1983) in which he also played a starring role, contained perhaps one of modern cinema’s most haunting sections of musical scoring, subsequently released (with lyrics and vocal by Sakamoto’s friend and collaborator, David Sylvian) under the title Forbidden Colours (1983). His soundtrack for Nagisa Oshima’s film Merry Christmas Mr.
![alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/9EEAAOSw0c1g~80A/s-l300.jpg)
Ryuichi Sakamoto – founder in 1978 of the Kraftwerkian electronic ensemble, Yellow Magic Orchestra, musical chameleon of post-Punk Synth-Pop, Oscar-winning composer of the score for Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor (1987) – has throughout his career perfected a musical language in which the yearning melancholy of western romanticism is tempered and further honed by oriental delicacy.
![alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto](https://lasopathisis949.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/6/6/126637242/625803508.jpg)
A brilliantly sustained dialogue between piano and electronics, they invoke a mesmeric quietude that is as richly satisfying in the poise of its melodic and structural resolutions, as it is in the seamless merger of its filmic romanticism and meditational subtlety. In such a context, the two recorded collaborations by the legendary musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and the German artist Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) Vrioon (2002) and Insen (2005) are among the most infectiously absorbing creations of minimalist electronica since Brian Eno’s pioneering Discreet Music (1975).
![alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto](http://www.mono-graphie.com/images/540/alva_noto_ryuichi_sakamoto/alva_noto_ryuichi_sakamoto_03.jpg)
Recent releases such as Systems/Layers (2003) by Rachels, or John Convertino’s Ragland (2005) have thus declared a re-animating process of enquiry – an enlivening, visceral awkwardness, almost – in a genre that might otherwise have become too at ease within its own aesthetic languor.
![alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto alva noto & ryuichi sakamoto](http://www.rhythmpassport.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/sakamoto.jpg)
In recent years, international Electronica has evolved from the colder, more urban intensity of artists such as Pole, Bola and Plastikman to explore the relationship between digital effects and what can almost sound like a tentative reclamation of classic, Schoenbergian Modernism.