Sakamoto’s solo album have always leaned more toward the avant-garde sonics of John Cage or Terry Riley than his more conventionally melodic, accessible film scores. And yet it all seems limitless.” These somber sentiments have inescapable extra weight in this context, given the composer’s own recent brush with serious illness. “How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?” Bowles muses.
Probably the most moving track is “ Fullmoon,” which features the voice of Paul Bowles reading a celebrated passage from his novel The Sheltering Sky, taken from the 1990 Bernardo Bertolucci film that Sakamoto scored. The async pieces also reflect elliptically on Sakamoto’s own film work. The symphonic synthesizer piece “ Solari” pays homage to Tarkovsky’s philosophical sci-fi classic Solaris, while the various pre-recorded vocals submerged within the ambient piano ripples of “Life, Life” are based on a poem by the legendary filmmaker’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky.
The musician describes the asyncalbum as “an imaginary soundtrack to a film Tarkovsky never finished,” and there are artful allusions to the Russian movie maestro in this performance. 'Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda': Film Review | Venice 2017