During his final creative phase before his death, Ryūichi Sakamoto completed one last project in December 2022 in collaboration with Alva Noto: 12 Conversations. Shortly after the passing of the Japanese composer and pianist, whose multifaceted musical career had produced numerous milestones and outstanding pieces, the album’s release seemed a distant prospect. However, the more time that passed, the clearer it became to Carsten Nicolai that it would be entirely in Sakamoto’s spirit to retrieve the collaborative pieces from the archive.
With cinematic calm and clarity, the individual dialogues between the two artists blend electronic and acoustic elements into a lingering atmosphere that possesses a weighty gravitas yet, at the same time, an exhilarating lightness. Ryūichi Sakamoto’s warming chord progressions on the piano are accompanied by Alva Noto’s surgically precise musical interventions, shifts and additions in the production, creating an intriguing interplay that thrives on the mutual trust forged through the two musicians’ many years of collaboration.
A breathing sound can be heard repeatedly; constant, gentle and dreamlike, it seems to serve as a rhythmic element dictating the tempo and duration of the twelve conversations, which now, with their release, symbolically continue to flow beyond death.
