Ryuichi Sakamoto Lets a Note Tell You What Happened After It Was Played

The sound of “andata” makes me pay attention to where a musical event stops being entirely somebody’s gesture. There is the beginning of a note. Later, the room or a different body of sound still seems to be carrying something the player has already let go. The person listening can become interested in that interval, in its proportion and in what it asks them to consider finished. An analysis that marks the event at its attack has registered useful information. It has missed part of the event Sakamoto has given the listener reason to follow. Milan Records’ release of async.

The pitched material might seem almost too unadorned in isolation. What follows an attack complicates the impression of plainness. Related sounds seem capable of differing degrees of endurance. Something apparently small can remain available to the ear long enough to impair the listener’s sense of where another sound begins. The composition makes the borders of events a source of activity. This is a different sort of musical density from the one a score could describe by showing how many notes took place.

Silence does not make an automatic case

An artist can demand patience from an audience and use the patience the audience supplies as a substitute for decisions. There are quiet records I find very hard to argue with because they leave nearly every act of interpretation to the listener. Their silence can achieve a reputation for giving space before anybody has asked what sort of space was made. “Andata” is more particular. I can notice where the apparent balance between an initial note and its residue begins to change. I can hear why I would miss that change if a new pitch were constantly being supplied to occupy my attention.

There is also pleasure in the risk that the ear will mislocate an arrival. A sound can feel as if it came forward out of something I had treated as background. The work can remain extraordinarily orderly and still make me unsure about which aspect of the order made a new entrance possible. In this sense memory is as active in the texture as the choice of pitch. The listener brings a small residue of the last event into a passage where several residues are already audible.

What I value in the piece is its refusal to let the minor disappearance of a note go by as a technical detail. Sound is still changing when our loudest account of what made it recognisable has run out. Sakamoto can give that fact enough time to become a meaningful part of the music.