BY MARK BOSCH
Two: Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto
Sydney Opera House, 21 October
Ever since co-founding Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s, Ryuichi Sakamoto has had an enviable career on the frontline of the electronic music boom and as a film score composer. His long-term collaboration with Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai, highly prolific in his own right), has seen the creation of six albums, the much-acclaimed soundtrack to The Revenant (2015), and various other projects like Sunday night’s Two at the Sydney Opera House.
In the interest of full disclosure, my only prior experience with Sakamoto’s body of work was the one-third he forms of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Simply put, I’m a dilettante, not that there’s anything wrong with that; aren’t we all? Being time-poor — along with the sheer amount of stuff in our world — means most of us can scarcely leave the “dabbling stage” in many areas in which we attempt to cultivate understanding. Especially so in the rarefied realm of electronic music, where the sheer amount of wires and dials and interfaces and whatnot can make the whole thing seem quite inscrutable for the average observer. But electronics have enjoyed near-ubiquitous inclusion in contemporary music, so perhaps we should aspire to a deeper understanding than the basic discernment of “instrument do this, computer do that”, which has more or less formed the extent of my knowledge.
However, it goes without saying that classical music culture and pedagogy privileges acoustic music-making. There’s a vague rationale to this — centred around canonical notions of authenticity, virtuosity, fine craftsmanship, and so on — but the more we reflect on this rationale, the more holes we start to see. For one, there is plenty of virtuosity in electronic music — it’s just not Liszt’s or Paganini’s. There is plenty of fine craftsmanship, too — it’s just not Stradivari’s, but software developers’ instead. You get the idea — it’s all technology, all the way down, so why limit ourselves?
The above paragraph could have been written two or three decades ago and nobody would have batted an eyelid. But it’s important to reiterate in the context of Sunday night’s performance, because the endless possibilities of electronic music — to which Sakamoto and Noto have devoted their careers — cannot be overstated. I say without reservation that they are innovators, and the directions their bodies of work have taken are directions to which we should be paying attention.
But, for all these qualifying statements, Two was ultimately quite sterile and unstimulating. There was very little in and of itself innovative over the two unbroken hours it unfolded — two hours that demanded something many members of the audience weren’t willing or able to give: abandonment to the flow of it all. I have never considered watching people make electronic music that interesting, partly due to the aforementioned biases, although I acknowledge that it’s an acquired taste. This acquired taste-ness was on full display with many of the audience coughing, whispering, and shuffling around — the couple next to me left after 40 minutes — while others got swept up in the performance’s slow burn, their heads bobbing, many of them ultimately giving a standing ovation. It was hardly a consensus, though.
Included were some cool, hypnotic visuals, but despite them – and given almost no superfluous movement from either of the two – the performance was just not that visually interesting. Melodically, neither; though timbrally, yes.
Still, were I listening at home, it would be music to study or fall asleep to. Such was the aimlessness of their semi-improvised minimalism, with barely a discernible melody between the arbitrarily divided four sets, and only the occasional, brief beat that inevitably led to nothing. I did eke some enjoyment out of Sakamoto’s use of prepared piano and electric guitar, but I was desperate. Desperately searching for any sort of emotion or meaningful atmosphere within a clean future aesthetic and soundworld that felt ultimately void and superficial.
I do admire that the performance was semi-improvised, but the thing is, there are improvisers in Sydney doing a lot more with a whole lot less spectacle, and to much smaller audiences. In the Moment: A Collection of Interactive Improvisations was one example I had the privilege of attending last month, but called to mind also is the work of the Splinter Orchestra, Ensemble Osnzemble, and many others in the exploratory music scene. It’s a matter of substance over style.
All things considered, though, there’s still plenty to celebrate about Two. It’s another step in the remarkable collaboration between Sakamoto and Noto, and it’s clearly something a lot of people want to see more of. I hope to count myself among them sooner or later; but in the meantime, all power to them!
Image supplied. Prudence Upton.
