http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qln-tUY4Oyw/S3cfJv46yiI/AAAAAAAAAEI/jkOEbweB53M/s320/Esperanto.jpg
anyone else love this album? completely insane early sampler music. it was recorded for a ballet performed by some new york dance troupe and features arto lindsay and yas kaz
sounds like digital gamelan, dissonant yet melodic, ambient and beautiful in places, lots of grainy low bitrate vintage sampler artifacts, w/ that weird mutant groove that sakamoto is so good at
unfortunately hard to come by but does turn up on vinyl every now and then -- needs to be reissued immediately
it's kinda the final experimental stage of sakamoto's work before he became a global pop star; it's not until much later that he started making experimental electronic music again
i think this is one of the strangest records i've ever heard
― 不合作的方式 (r1o natsume), Monday, 12 July 2010 01:24 (thirteen years ago) link
have a youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXNVAryP1mU
― 不合作的方式 (r1o natsume), Monday, 12 July 2010 01:26 (thirteen years ago) link
I enjoy this.
― An Ingénue is Lost in the Woods (Policeman, Policeman, Come Quickly), Monday, 12 July 2010 12:35 (thirteen years ago) link
yes it's good. Need to revisit this one.
― ¿Can Your Gato Do the Perro? (Capitaine Jay Vee), Monday, 12 July 2010 17:29 (thirteen years ago) link
love this album
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 12 July 2010 17:30 (thirteen years ago) link
love when the john carpenter synths bust into the first track
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 12 July 2010 17:31 (thirteen years ago) link
definitely my favorite record of his & still sounds strange (although this sounds less like experimental music than it once did, now it just sounds good)
one of those things that badly needs to be reissued (with the 15 minute ambient b-side 'Exhibition' from the 'Field Work' 12" as a bonus track)
& yeah it was the high water mark for his experimental approach, his solo records had been getting seemingly weirder up until this point with this one going even further than 'B-2 Unit', but then he kind of got serious about his post-YMO solo career and went for slick cosmopolitan global-village world-music pop like 'Beauty'. Those albums aren't my thing (there's maybe the occasional track, but even those you sort of have to squint to enjoy), but the whole global-village aesthetic really started on this one, language & folk music from around the world sliced and diced down into completely bizarre sound music
cool to see other posts on it
― Milton Parker, Monday, 12 July 2010 17:31 (thirteen years ago) link
thanks for posting milton, it was actually some posts by you that tipped me off on this album
there's some fairly strange stuff on illustrated music encyclopaedia, but nothing comes even close to "exhibition". the idea of putting a 15 minute sampler experiment as the b-side of a 12" pop single with thomas dolby blows my mind
there's a video on youtube of sakamoto performing this great track called "cafe lotus" on youtube, rocking an emulator ii and a dx7 at some temple in bali. i can't for the life of me work out where the track is from but it's very good and in the esperanto style. i wonder if this was his setup for the album?
― 不合作的方式 (r1o natsume), Friday, 16 July 2010 21:10 (thirteen years ago) link
good to know! hadn't seen this. getting a little too much mileage out of the dx7 tubular bells patch but the kecak emulator loop is fun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuwWfkGWZHI
― Milton Parker, Monday, 19 July 2010 01:06 (thirteen years ago) link
That first youtube sounds like Bruce Gilbert's Insiding, which was commissioned for a ballet.
― bamcquern, Monday, 19 July 2010 03:31 (thirteen years ago) link
Have you heard this?http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/4319/167976.jpg
― bamcquern, Monday, 19 July 2010 03:34 (thirteen years ago) link
Not exactly like Insiding. It reminds me, is all.
― bamcquern, Monday, 19 July 2010 03:35 (thirteen years ago) link
Gotta hear this stuff.
― abstract sand patterns, representing water (corey), Monday, 19 July 2010 04:22 (thirteen years ago) link
http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/5378/21311202th.jpg
small pic
Yasuaki Shimizu from Made to Measure series
― bamcquern, Tuesday, 24 August 2010 15:25 (thirteen years ago) link
fans and disciples of this record MUST watch the below youtubes. extracts from a performance in 1985 of ryuichi sakamoto and radical tv, continuing in the avant sampling style of Esperanto but heavier and noisier -- out of sync electro loops, huge gated drums, frantically transposed vocal samples, a Neubauten loop and some Mahler, alongside a huge Sony jumbotron screen (the largest video screen in the world at that point) projecting primitive digital video edits and computer graphics while sakamoto bounces around behind his gear in a boiler suit
essential viewing, basically
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c31AjIlYj8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJBxeSyz6vIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D020I9hhq94
was reissued on DVD in 2005 so should be still available, somewhere
― missingNO, Monday, 17 January 2011 09:10 (thirteen years ago) link
i guess there's not many ryuichi sakamoto fans here
― missingNO, Tuesday, 18 January 2011 01:43 (thirteen years ago) link
I love Sakamoto! I hadn't bookmarked this thread though. You should check out the thread for Interior/Testpattern if you're interested.
― =(^ • ‿‿ • ^)= (corey), Tuesday, 18 January 2011 01:45 (thirteen years ago) link
I really really love that one song, uh... corey what's the name of thar song I really like?
Haven't heard much else though
― lamey g. curtis (Stevie D(eux)), Tuesday, 18 January 2011 01:45 (thirteen years ago) link
this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrjHZloAOh4
― =(^ • ‿‿ • ^)= (corey), Tuesday, 18 January 2011 01:52 (thirteen years ago) link
i guess there's not many ryuichi sakamoto fans here― missingNO, Tuesday, January 18, 2011 1:43 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
don't post on a sunday if you want people to respond
― jaxon, Tuesday, 18 January 2011 02:03 (thirteen years ago) link
those youtubes are great. Holger Hiller was definitely hip to Esperanto before doing the Ohi Ho Bang Bang videos but I wonder if he knew about these Radical TV videos as well
nothing to do with anything:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoeO2LfpJVU&feature=player_embedded#!
― Milton Parker, Tuesday, 18 January 2011 02:26 (thirteen years ago) link
I'd been looking out for this album since I discovered it here, but just ordered it on discogs. Listening to it in full now, I feel like this is the Sakamoto I've always been looking for (but gave up after being misled by “Beauty”): just the right combination of avant garde experimentation, quirky almost popish elements, and alluring weirdness. Very curious what it was like to hear in its original time and context.
― ed.b, Sunday, 9 December 2018 04:05 (five years ago) link
This is finally getting reissued on WeWantSounds!
― willem, Thursday, 23 September 2021 08:13 (two years ago) link
Listening to this right now, as someone said above, would never have believed it's from 1985.
― Porking level G4 (Boring, Maryland), Thursday, 23 September 2021 14:52 (two years ago) link
yeah the only thing I can think of in that era that sounds similar is Hosono's Monad stuff
― frogbs, Thursday, 23 September 2021 14:58 (two years ago) link
This is finally getting reissued on WeWantSounds!🕸
― willem, Saturday, 20 November 2021 07:20 (two years ago) link
just picked up the reissue. man, was this ahead of its time. it sounds like a Giant Claw record.
― frogbs, Wednesday, 8 December 2021 03:32 (two years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-nJPWJE0cs
someone ripped the 33 minute laserdisc that was released alongside it. doesn't feature any of the performance, it's far trippier. in retrospect a bit of a vaporwave origin story
― frogbs, Wednesday, 8 December 2021 15:00 (two years ago) link