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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.

Review: Here comes the second episode of the fifth series of the anthology series Black Mirror, composed by cult electro pop artist, David Bowie collaborator, and synth wizard. Ever since the late 1970s people have been enthralled to this man's deft soundtrack work as he constantly serves up devastatingly emotional pieces of apparently empty music that is a long way from the playful pop he stared with as part of Yellow Magic Orchestra. This new one is perfectly zen, meditative and mindful, with delicate synth drones and glassy keys, icy tinkles and distant ripples soothing your mind, body and soul.

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: Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1984 classic, Ongaku Zuka, finally gets a long overdue re-release. Heralded at the time as yet another example of Japan's sorely-missed musical genius in full flow, the tracks feature contributions from Yellow Magic Orchestra's Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, alongside Yasuaki Shimizu, Tatsuro Yamashita and Toshinori Kondo. Originally released in two versions, one with a bonus 7" two-track EP and another with a limited edition 12" three-tracker, both are now being reissued for the modern age. Part of an ongoing celebration of Sakamoto's life following his death in March 2023, when Ongaku Zukan (Musical Encyclopedia) hit it marked the celebrated musician and composer's first top five hit in his homeland, building on the success of both his soundtrack to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and the Yellow Magic Orchestra, on which time had only recently been called. Syth pop perfection, with unique, mesmerising instrumental compositions, it's an essential for any fan.

Review: Where to begin with this? Vrioon, quite simply, is a work overloaded with beauty. The blue, heartache solitary piano of Sakamoto bleeding into the micro-constructions and nano-beats of Carsten Nicolai's rewired machinery. "During his first live tour in Japan, Carsten Nicolai met Ryuichi Sakamoto in Tokyo. One year later Nicolai was asked to remix material from Sakamoto for the Japanese magazine Code Unfinished. "The material that was given to me was already layered with digital effects. From one little clean piano piece I made the first track. I combined those simple piano chords with a clear rhythm constellation. Somehow Ryuichi was very surprised and really liked my work. Weeks later he sent me another piece recorded specifically for this project." The result is an interweave of tracks that is quite simply breathtaking, a melange of pure cathartic piano progressions and whispering beats, a re-definition of minimalism and intellectual application into something that is quite clearly open and exposed as a spectrum of emotion and sonic loveliness. Immense.

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: Since its initial release back in 2008, Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto's fourth collaborative album, UTP, has become one of the pair's most celebrated full-length excursions. There's a good reason for that, too. Recorded with the Ensemble Modern string section, it presents an impeccable, atmospheric and otherworldly blend of electronic ambience, high-minded abstract experimentalism, and modern classical that benefits greatly from the presence of variations on multiple tracks - a creative decision that makes it sound like a cyclical, subtly evolving trip through minimalistic, Reichian movements. Astonishingly, this is the first time the album has ever been available on vinyl, so we'd expect copies to fly out. Pre-order now to avoid disappointment.

Review: Not seen Exception? OK, let's start there. The Netflix series is at the vanguard of new adult animation epics. Setting its scene(s) in the future, we follow a space mission crew desperately searching for a world that can be terraformed in order to sustain life, humans already having been driven from Earth. It's a stark and foreboding journey which resonates almost too much in an age when the climate crisis is just beginning to show us what happens next.
For something like this you need a score of serious standards, so who better to draft than the master himself, Ryuchi Sakamoto. One of Japan's most respected, revered, and iconic musical minds is pretty much capable of creating anything, from curious pop to the kind of atmospheric overtures, strange incidentals, ambient arrangements and nerve-rattling movements that define this soundtrack.

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.