Review of Disappearance [12k1076]

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The sonic research of the legendary Japanese electronic composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto and 12k label owner Taylor Deupree already intersected in the past since when Deupree was asked to remix a song from Sakamoto’s notorious album Chasm and later on the occasion of the collaborative and collagist project Chain Music and KizunaWorld together with Stephen Vitiello. The common place of residence, New York, cemented this artistic collaboration so that it was presumably clear a collaborative album was not to be late. The seeds of “Disappearance” got sown on the occasion of their live performance at John Zorn’s club The Stone in April 2012 as they started to record the first tracks for this album at Sakamoto’s studio while they were rehearsing that concert. The slowly sliding of piano feeble melodies, underground rivers of low frequencies, crepuscolar flaring tones and unexpected sonic extrusions over recordings grabbed from the room, which include breathes, shuffling on chairs, metallic tinkling and other found objects of the initial “Jyaku”, a Japanese word which could be translated as “weak”, perfectly begin this sonic idyll which focuses on themes like isolation, solitude and contemplation about the fragility of nature and life. Similar reticulum on the following tracks, which becomes slightly hypnotic and soothingly hibernated on “Frozen Fountain”, dully eerie and ghastly withered on the entrancing “Ghost Road”, before the daydreaming sedation, which seems to seesawing between lucid dreams and nostalgic nodules on “This Window”, where time seems to get marked in a slow mental rhythm by inner journeys and a sneaking unsettled state. “Curl To Me”, the beautiful final act of this inspiring sonic incantation, where the imaginary vanishing protagonist could be discerned beyond a mirror, could echo the ultimate atonement of a sensorial process, which ends with the perception of the breathe, the heartbeat and the voice of talented Japanese singer Ichiko Aoba, former collaborator of both Ryuichi and Taylor, who anoint “Disappearance” by an evoking and meaningful biological junction to life before its fade-out.

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