Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto have announced a recorded version of ‘TWO’, the collaborative live show the duo performed at various venues, including Berlin’s Funkhaus and London’s Barbican Centre, throughout 2018.
TWO captures their performance at the Sydney Opera House, which features a mixture of live improvisation and renditions of pieces taken from their collaborative back catalog, including their score for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant.
TWO‘s pulsing, immersive live performance melded electronic and analogue instrumentation with striking visuals to create one of the most precise, beautiful and challengingly magnetic pieces we have ever had the privilege of staging,” says Ben Marshall, who is Head of Contemporary Music at Sydney Opera House. “That Sakamoto and Noto are pleased enough with the recorded result to share its continuously unfolding, sinuous, questioning music with others is as singular an honour as it was for Sydney Opera House to host them.”
The live album follows the pair’s collaborative album Glass, as well as Sakamoto’s solo album async, both of which were released in 2017.
TWO arrives on November 15 and is available to pre-order now. Check out the album artwork and tracklist below.
Tracklist:
01. ‘Inosc’
02. ‘Propho’
03. ‘Trioon II (Live)’
04. ‘Scape I’
05. ‘Berlin (Live)’
06. ‘Scape II’
07. ‘Morning (Live)’
08. ‘Iano (Live)’
09. ‘Emspac’
10. ‘Kizuna (Live)’
11. ‘Gitrac’
12. ‘Monomom’
13. ‘Panois’
14. ‘Naono (Live)’
15. ‘The Revenant Theme (Live)’
Speaking of Sakamoto, Parisian imprint WEWANTSOUNDS will reissue Ryuichi Sakamoto’s debut solo album Thousand Knives Of on vinyl. Aside from a small-scale release in 1982, this will mark the first time the album will be available on vinyl outside of Japan since it was originally released in 1978.
The album features contributions from Hideki Matsutake and Haruomi Hosono but precedes the first releases from Yellow Magic Orchestra, arguably paving the way for the legendary band’s synthetic sound. Tracks that would go on to become staples of YMO and Sakamoto’s live sets such as ‘Plastic Bamboo’ and ‘The End Of Asia’ feature here for the first time.
The reissue has been remastered from the original tapes by producer and engineer Seigen Ono and comes with original artwork, including an OBI strip and 4p insert, with a new introduction by Paul Bowler.
Thousand Knives Of arrives on November 8 and is available to pre-order now.