Customer Reviews

Esperanto

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This is one of my personal favorites of Mr. Sakamoto's discs. It is not going to be for everyone. It can't be approached like his pop work or his soundtracks but the overall tone, the sounds, and his best craftsmanship are all here. I like his ecclectic tendencies but I am most impressed here with the originality and consistancy. Mr Sakamoto has reached a place where his music is more evenly constructed with things like Discord, 1996, BTTB, Love is the Devil, but Esperanto was written years ahead of those works. Maybe the consistancy comes from this being music for a ballet but it could also be great music for an animated film. AND it is really funny. The music on Esperanto is very "Modern Dance-like" and I have little patience with that kind of unrelenting starkness and disonance but there is a quality of sound and humor and "taste" here that is is truly inviting. If Mr Sakamoto had decided to pursue this kind of composing I believe he would not have been nearly as commercially successful as he is. But I have never heard any other music like this and I lament that this recording has no siblings.

This little known album by Ryuichi is his finest one as his avant-garde music stuff. He's mellowed down considerably recently, perhaps because of his own reputation in the past, producing some banal albums such as Smoochy, BTTB, etc. The general public may be pleased to listen to those banal understandable albums, but the most committed members of his audience would find this album Esperanto much more interesting and even more seductive. The music in the album is self-contained, despite the fact it was supposed to have been composed for an American dancer for her dance performance. As the commentary, which is included in the sold CD case, says (in Japanese), you would feel as if the dance performance were for his music, rather than his for hers.