Glass

Albumbeschreibung

From the dawn of the 2000s, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai alias Alva Noto have often found time for an album or a concert. While the Japanese composer is an international star known for the eclecticism of his work, the German only sails in the waters of avant-gardist electronic music, which is fascinating but demanding... The project Glass which falls into this category is the fruit of a long improvisation of the sort the two men adore, after just one rehearsal, in the famous glass house built in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut, by the architect Philip Johnson. In their hands, keyboards and synths of course, but also glasses, crotals (ancient percussion instruments from Greece and Egypt made from two metal plates) and the house itself!

The result is a 34-minute trip, to be enjoyed in a single sitting. A long, impossibly introspective poem. Like a vast sonic landscape where textures tumble after each other and which sounds different from the older albums that brought together Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto in the past. Glass offers, above all, a powerful fusion of two styles, rather than their superposition. They seem to communicate in a single voice, in one long ambient song, which ought to be given proper attention, not listened to with one ear while making dinner...