Back catalogue: All genres

Review: Vrioon was the first ever collaboration album between Alva Noto and legendary synth man and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. 20 years after it became the first instalments of V.I.R.U.S.'s five records together it gets the full reissue treatment. The original tracks from the album are joined by an all new composition 'Landscape Skizze' which was laid down in 2005. The record is defined by alternate piano chords, lush electronic tones and quivering timbres that are delicate yet impactful.

Review: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto dropped this one first back in 2006. It was the third collaborative album between the ambient maestros and the third installment of V.I.R.U.S.'s five albums series. It was remastered last year and now gets served up as a reissue alongside three all-new pieces, namely 'City Radieuse', 'Veru 1', and 'Veru 2'. The first of those was written for a short cinematic essay in 2012. The album centres around the pano with padded bass and electronic frequencies adding extra depth and texture. It is another classic in their oeuvre.

Review: While most celebrated in electronic music circles for his work as part of Yellow Magic Orchestra - not to mention a string of experimental solo works - Ryuichi Sakamoto has long been an acclaimed composer of music for the big screen. As the title suggests, this fine compilation gathers together some of his best soundtrack works. There are plenty of familiar favourites present - check the chiming, suitably cheery theme to "Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence" and the swelling closing theme from "The Last Emperor" - alongside lesser-known gems such as the lilting strings of "The Sheltering Sky (Main Theme)", the simmering beauty of "Little Buddha: Acceptance" and the jazz-influenced bliss of "Femme Fatale: Bolerisch".

Review: Ryuichi Sakamoto is making a very welcome return here with his first solo album since 2017's async. Milan Records are releasing 12 in January to coincide with the venerated Japanese composer's 71st birthday, and the timing is poignant given the album draws from musical sketches created while Sakamoto battled for two and a half years with cancer. Sakamoto himself describes reaching for his synths as a kind of therapeutic response to a big operation, and so the music carries an added depth of personal experience from one of the most profound ordeals a person can go through.

Review: With a string of soundtrack credits as long as your proverbial arm, it's no surprise Yellow Magic Orchestra man Ryuichi Sakamoto was top of the list when it came to scoring this "sumptuous romantic melodrama" from director Ann Hui. This is his first score for a Chinese film, however, and he pulls out the emotional stops to betray the tense, tumultuous stirrings going on beneath the surface of tight lipped manners and suppressed feelings. Many of the themes are explored through simple piano playing before returning in the form of complex string arrangements, a clever trick that proves Sakamoto was worthy of his Best Original Film Score prize at the 40th Hong Kong Film Awards for this work.

Review: The late great Ryuichji Salamoto has left us with a vast body of work to enjoy until the end of time and amongst the many highlights of his ground breaking catalogue was this album, Async. It was Ryuichi's first solo album in eight years at time of release in 2017 and fund him taking inspiration from "everyday objects, sculpture, and nature." Sakamoto said this was an album about making the sounds he most wanted to listen to and was made with the traditional Japanese idea in mind that, "less-is-more." It is full of field recordings and was recorded in New York City with a deep selection of unique acoustic and electric sounds.

Review: Wewantsounds has put together a re-release of the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto's classic album Coda, which was originally issued in his native Japan in 1983. This album is a solo piano rendition of the seminal Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence soundtrack and has never been available outside Japan until now. It finds legendary composer Sakamoto perform acoustic piano interpretations of his iconic themes including the classic title track and 'Germination,' which later featured in the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack. Remastered by Seigen Ono's Saidera Mastering studio in Tokyo, this reissue includes the original artwork and a four page insert with new liner notes by Andy Beta.

Review: There is just no stopping Vibez 93, one of the busiest and most relabel beat makers in the drum & bass world right now. This new EP, Punkrocker, is another hard-hitting one in several different ways. The opener 'Aquatic Rock' makes an emotional impact - the soulful sounds, ambient pads and delicate floating breaks get you in the mood before things get darker with driving bass and ragga vocals. 'Herault' is another one with jazzy melodies and warm, spring-day atmospheres over tumbling drums and the title cut then gets playful on broken beats, undulating rhythms and filtered melodic loops. 'Serious (Style & Niceness)' is icy and minimal and brilliant.

Review: Wewantsounds continues to respond to that request with another benchmark reissue following Egyptian musician and composer Ammar El Sherei's Oriental Music. This time taking one of the definitive releases in Ryuichi Sakamoto's extensive oeuvre and making it shiny and new. Or at least giving it a dusting down, not that the contents were ever going to sound anything other than fresh.

Hidari... was such a groundbreaking album at the time because of the pop sensibilities Sakamoto actively looked to root the album in by way of enlisting British producer Robin Scott and American guitarist Adrian Belew in addition to members of his Yellow Magic Orchestra. The result sounds like intoxicating downtempo electronica, jerky elec-house, 1980s fantasy movie soundtracks and Far Eastern percussive exoticism. So apparently a marriage of styles and places that we consider striking today does sound even better 39 years later.

Review: Originally released in 2017, async was the 19th studio album from Japanese heavyweight Ryuichi Sakamoto, breaking a near-decade-long hiatus during which he was treated for throat cancer. And it's incredibly dense stuff to dive into, with genius on display both in terms of theoretical approach to recording, and avant-garde thinking behind what a record could and should be. Of course, that's hardly surprising for Sakamoto, whose legacy as one of Japan's foremost sonic adventurers may still not be stated enough, even after all the post-humous repressings and tributes. On this outing, then, we have strange, otherworldly interpretations of everyday instruments, a heavy focus on playing with textures of sound, bits of artists such as David Sylvian and Paul Bowles reading texts, found noises from city streets and themes of mortality, and our difficulty in accepting that truth.

Review: You had us at Sakamoto. Or rather you had us at "excerpts from Ryuichi Sakamoto's time working under Nippon Colombia's label, Better Days. First released in 1992, this 12-track compilation runs from tracks that appeared on the Japanese synth legend's debut album, Thousand Knives, first released in 1978, through to songs written with the iconic session group KYLYN, featuring celebrated guitar great Kazumi Watanabe. Ever the auteur, even if you didn't know this was Sakamoto in proper landmark mode, there's no chance the sounds here could really be confused for anyone or anything else. It's mature and intelligent, yet strangely - and typically - fun, childlike and a little cartoonish, sharing as much in common with experimental electronica that was emerging during the 1970s and 1980s as video game scores from the 1990s.

Review: It's eerie, deeply atmospheric, littered with what feel like found noises and strange abstract tones, but then rooted in impressive levels of musicality, possessing just enough form and structure to move beyond sound installation into full blown movements.

Or at least that's the case with the first part of this double release, Garden of Shadows & Light (Part 1), which sees melody used in almost abstract ways to bring emotional responses out of the listener. Meanwhile, Part 2 takes us into submerged realms that may or may not have something to do with whales. If all this sounds pretty out there then it should, after all this is Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Toop's live performance from The Silver Building in London in 2018, where the former performed sat at and inside a piano, while the latter used bone conduction and vibration motors among other things. Eccentric and innovative.

Review: Released to coincide with Japanese musical Goliath Ryuichi Sakamoto's 70th birthday, To the Moon & Back was almost inevitable. Even without worrying reports about the maestro's health, there's no way anyone can have such a significant impact on global music for so long and not have people wanting to pay tribute upon reaching septuagenarian years.
And what a tribute it is. Taking elements from a huge back catalogue that stretches back to the mid-1970s, contemporary greats including Thundercat, Alva Noto, Hildur Guonadottir, The Cinematic Orchestra, and David Sylvian offer new versions and remixes of the master's stuff, with each track here chosen by Sakamoto, which is about as significant a seal of approval as you could hope for. Like the man himself, it's widely varied, consistently innovative and just really, really good.