In the liner notes for ¡°async,¡± his first solo album in eight years, Ryuichi Sakamoto lists some of the strategies he employed during the recording process: capturing elusive melodies at early-morning synthesizer sessions, compiling field recordings of rain and ruins, rearranging Bach chorales until they resembled fine mist.
That may sound like the recipe for a new-age record, but Sakamoto isn¡¯t inclined to take the easy-listening route to serenity. With ¡°async,¡± he resists the prettiness that has characterized some of his best-known work, and comes out all the stronger for it.
Shiro Takatani¡¯s cover art ¡ª in which photos of garden pots and the insides of a piano are transformed into abstract horizontal stripes, like a Gerhard Richter painting gone digital ¡ª serves as an apt metaphor for the album itself. While Sakamoto¡¯s previous solo outing, 2009¡¯s ¡°Out of Noise,¡± seemed torn between the worlds of classical music and electronica, the analog and synthetic, ¡°async¡± erases the difference.
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