Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s partnership is nearing a decade now, and it’s odd to think that (from what I remember), the pairing of a laptop and an acoustic musician was quite odd at the time – especially given Sakamoto’s history as a ‘proper’ classical musician. It could be philistine-coloured glasses on my part, but my memory of the early ’00s was that digital musicians and non-digital musicians weren’t frequent bedfellows. Laptops were laptops and pianos were pianos, and ne’er the twain shall meet. This might be coloured on my part by playing in a band with a laptop, and nightmareish soundchecks with soundguys who didn’t quite get that the laptop was going to be actually playing as a full member of the band. And seeing Noto/Sakamoto at The Barbican was the first live show I saw where I really felt that ‘live’ instruments were entirely melded to laptops as a complete sound-whole. By this point in the 21st-century, of course, it’s fairly de rigeur to have laptops onstage. It’s even infiltrated the musically stillborn deathnest of indie music. Which is a victory, of sorts.
Away from the “Microon” pieces – probably the more striking experiments on this record – both parties are doing some lovely give-and-take with relative identities. Sakamoto will play some odd preparations on the piano while Noto’s playing some relatively straight melodic lines. So there are moments of jagged, awkward what-the-fuck-is-that-sound things and moments of straight, Eno-esque ambient music (most obviously in the two covers of Eno’s own “By This River”).
But if you’re wondering what the record’s like – well, it’s pretty lush, basically. If you know Noto, you’ll know him for having one of the most exquisite capacities for attention-to-sonic-detail, and for intensely-considered rendering of notes. And Sakamoto plays some great, sparse, brittle, complementary tones. Neither fuss themselves too much with playing on-the-beat, and it feels like two people entirely relaxed in each other’s musical company – even if the results run the gamut from tumultuous clusters to more plaintive ambience. Great, great record.
I was a bit scared of listening to Mimikry. It definitely got sidelined a bit. Both artists have such a reputation, and a massive back-catalogue of amazingness, that I kind of worried about how it would fit together. With Sakamoto it’s less of a concern – he’s got a massive resource of ideas and techniques that can usually be relied upon to deliver the goods. With Blixa Bargeld I (stupidly) assumed he’d just be singing or guitaring over this record in a kind of disconnected fashion.
Opening track “Fall” feels like about a million things at once. Oddly, one of the things that jumps out about it for me is how the internal logic of it reminds me of tone-poems (of the R Strauss variety), almost in spite of the actual music. There’s a moment or two of tone clusters á la whichever 20th-century composer you’d care to name, but otherwise the form feels more like poetry draped in opulent sound. There’s a bit where Bargeld’s doing that recording thing of having the mic so close that you can hear the spittle dripping in the plosive sounds, and Noto uses that to make a tiny section of pricklish rhythmic mess. It’s over in a second or so, but it just floored me. And this record is drenched in the sort of touches that’ll probably be flooring me this time next year.
In short, both of these records are well worth your time, but with Christmas coming up you might want to buy several copies of Mimikry because, frankly, your auntie deserves better than your usual ill-thought-out, ‘will this do?’ luxury chocolates.
-Kev Nickells-
