Vital Weekly (NL)

On the first of these two discs we find a quartet of players, who never played together as such before. It is a recording at the Yamaguchi Center For Arts & Media – which is a great place in a very nice part of Japan, believe me – which existed ten years and hosted an installation by Sakamoto (erstwhile of Yellow Magic Orchestra, but that seems light years ago) and without much preparation, other than a lot of talk in the preceding days, they took the stage. Sakamoto on the piano, treated piano and percussion, Deupree on modular synth and Illuha being a duo of Corey Fuller on guitar, pianet, electronics and Tomoyoshi Date on pump organ, electronics and noises. If you followed the careers of Sakamoto and Deupree over the last ten to twenty years you may know where this sort of collaborations go, music wise; lengthy drones, carefully processed sounds, spacious and atmospheric clustered tones. In that respect one could say ‘Perpetual’ is more of the same. But there are also small differences, I think. In ‘Movement, 2’ there is also a bit of percussion, sparse as it is, it’s perhaps also not the most common feature, but it works quite well Also the third (and last) movement has these faint traces of percussion, which act more like footsteps in the snow rather than any sort of consecutive rhythm. Sakamoto is as sparse as always on the piano, playing very slow music. There is a fine ambiance in this recording, a sort of natural reverb (maybe this recording is a combination of microphone and line recordings), which adds a subtle layer to the music. Despite these little differences this perhaps exactly the kind of you would expect and these expectations are met: this won’t disappoint any fan of this kind of music. It’s a great album.