The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". showing relevant, targeted ads on and off our web propertiesĭetailed information can be found on our Privacy Policy page. personalized search, content, and recommendations remembering privacy and security settings remembering account, browser, and regional preferences Over the course of the record, he richly develops this style, straddling beauty and dissatisfaction.The Vinyl Factory Group, trading as: The Vinyl Factory, Vinyl Factory Manufacturing, Phonica Records, FACT Magazine, FACT TV, Spaces Magazine, Vinyl Space, and The Store X, uses cookies and similar technologies to give you a better experience, enabling things like: Just when Sakamoto hints at a thematic resolution in a piece, he shifts and poses another lucid riddle. The compositions follow suite in their long-winded and utterly unpredictable nature. You can almost picture the young man alone in the studio, laboring for hours without sleep. Sakamoto’s intense concentration and fascination with his work is apparent from simply listening. Sakamoto’s vision simply refuses to erect walls. And the pieces on side two like “The End of Asia” and “Das Neue Japanische Elektronische Volkslied” seamlessly integrate melodic motifs and textures from traditional eastern folk music into his psychedelic cauldron. In the bouncy, bucolic, “Grasshoppers,” he demonstrates his sheer prowess on the keys with a purer, jazz-inflected sound. Here, Sakamoto manipulates his synthesizers into the sound of birds and conducts a warped chorus of chirping. “One Thousand Knives” is a revelation from the gospel of whacky synthpop.Įlsewhere, “Island of Woods” moodily employs synth arpeggios amongst scattered field recordings of oceans and urban crowds. Over the course of its nearly ten-minute runtime, it recycles a set of disparate themes, visiting and revisiting them in a sort of mesmerizing loop. It is a profoundly intellectual recording yet totally danceable. The thumping drum machines equal parts night club and folk dance…the playful, ever-shifting palette of synthesizers… the ebbing and flowing between harmonic anxiety and ecstasy. The opening title track gloriously encapsulates this whole vision. “One Thousand Knives” boldly fuses Sakamoto’s academic tastes for classical piano with bubbly dancefloor grooves and bizarre soundscapes. It’s the brink of a new, digital age and you are in the fever dream of a great composer.
Ryuichi sakamoto album school free#
Here we discover a young genius who is situated at the historic frontier of electronic music, free to pursue his limitless stylistic whims. The work of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Sakamoto in this era would eventually turn on a whole generation to the synthesizer sound and lay seminal groundwork for decades of electronic music to come.įor a composer whose expansive repertoire would later address everything from bossa nova to ambient music, “One Thousand Knives” actually serves a surprisingly thorough primer to the work of Sakamoto. Mythology actually holds Sakamoto’s “One Thousand Knives” as the first track to ever use the famous Roland TR-808 drum machine. A member in the rising pop group called Yellow Magic Orchestra, Sakamoto found himself among the very first musicians to experiment with synthesizers and digital recording technology.
In 1978, Sakamoto had just earned his master’s degree in music from Tokyo University and was merely at the threshold of his lifelong artistic journey. The music itself seems to resonate with this same ramped-up, wired state of consciousness. Sakamoto recorded “One Thousand Knives” over an intense, 500-hour period in which he often went whole days without sleeping. While at work on his first solo record in 1978, the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto encountered this famous passage by poet Henri Michaux, writing on his own experimental mescaline usage. “…Suddenly a thousand knives, suddenly a thousand brilliant scythes of light set in lightning, huge enough to level whole forests, violently start slicing up space from top to bottom with gigantic slashes, with amazingly rapid slashes that I have to keep up with, inwardly, painfully… and when will it end… will it ever end?”
0 kommentar(er)
