commmons SPECIAL

The previous "CHASM" was released in 2004, so this is the first solo album release in 5 years. However, I feel that they are not so far apart from each other, because during that time they were enthusiastically working on various projects. It is a new thing to remember that many fans were pleased by playing electronica to funk techno in activities ranging from HASYMO to YMO, but there are also other "acoustic" such as Karlsten Nicolai and Christian Fennes. In collaboration with artists, as an installation of the 1999 opera "LIFE a ryuichi sakamoto opera 1999" with video artist Shiro Takatani entitled "LIFE-fluid, invisible, inaudible..." I also made many works that were different from "music" in the general sense, such as rebuilding.
And the new title that was delivered was "out of noise". Whether it can be translated as "from noise" or "out of noise", it's a meaningful title.

"Imagine the meaning of the title by the person who received it. The phrase "out of noise" is a word that suddenly came out of my mouth... from the flute work group of the early music group who participated in the album. When I went to the UK to make a recording, it was really soft while I was drinking with them in a pub and talking about music and small stories.''

If you think of "noise" that Sakamoto says here as "noise" in Japanese, the meaning is a little wrong. A sound that is not a "musical sound" played by an instrument ... should be regarded as "non-musical sound".

“Noise and sound, and the sound of an instrument or a meaningful voice spoken by someone... I wanted to lower the boundaries between these various sounds and treat them all in the same way.”

The typical noise recorded on the album is the sound that Sakamoto himself recorded in the Arctic Circle. These were captured by a handy recorder or an underwater microphone (!), and they have various expressions, such as the sound of "schwaswa" that small ice particles make, and the sound of glacial ice melting.

“I went to the Arctic Circle in October last year. It was a 10-day trip where scientists and artists boarded a ship together to see the reality of global warming in a British project called Cape Farewell. I didn't want to be interrupted because I was in the middle of making an album, but when I went there, I was shocked unexpectedly. ...It's a monochrome world, and even though I landed in Greenland, I didn't grow any trees, so I was absent because I couldn't adapt to the civilized society right after returning to New York. , I had to finish the album early, so I finished it while remembering the impact of the Arctic Circle.

There are 3 songs called "disko", "ice" and "glacier" that were created based on the sounds collected in the Arctic Circle. Sakamoto calls them "the arctic trilogy"... Arctic trilogy.

"In Greenland, there is an island called Disco Island, and what surprised me when I landed there was a sad dog's bark that echoed all over the island. It was a worker pulling a sled, not a pet. After returning to the studio in New York, I recorded what I recorded with a handy recorder, looped it to create something like a rhythm, and put the guitar of Cornelius Keigo Oyamada on it.''

The music that was created by exquisitely editing the sounds of timeless spacetime, the song of the dog of Greenland and the guitar of Keigo Oyamada in Tokyo, using a computer, wanders the boundary between noise and music. It is a beauty that no one has ever heard.