Live Review: Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto

Stephen Nomura Schible’s 2017 documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda screened to sold-out sessions at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, granting fans a rare insight into the legendary artist’s life and works. The documentary traces Sakamoto’s quiet yet graceful determination to create music, even though he had just recovered from a battle with throat cancer and living in the shadow of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown. 

Tonight In Two, his collaboration with German electronic glitch artist Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai), the duo produce a quartet of scores that pick up where they had left off in their work together on the soundtrack to The Revenant. Only this time, there is no Leo and no bear.

Ensconced within their individual tapered sound desks at either side of the wide stage, a baby grand between them and a long screen behind displaying streamlined cymatics, Noto and Sakamoto resemble pilots who've taken the captive, diverse audience on a wordless, uncertain journey. Noto typically adds the electro-ambient sounds first – a throbbing pulse like a distant heartbeat that grows gradually, followed by unexpected blips and mild screeches, and Sakamoto then paints sheer layers of what could only loosely be termed ‘melodies’. Just as in the documentary where he delightfully fossicked around a forest collecting, assembling and recording the sound of autumn leaves crunching under his feet, or producing sounds from spare car parts, pebbles and wood, Sakamoto is immersed in his own mental sheet music. He presides over a sound machine too and he flits around his station, tinkering the piano keys, running wooden pipes along the piano’s tensioned bowels, and picking up his electric guitar and laying it flat on his lap like a steel pedal.

Sakamoto’s penchant for adding quirky, almost joyful electronic pop references in his compositions is a signature humanistic touch. When Noto’s futuristic, stark undertones dominate the landscape and all appears soulless, Sakamoto adds the humanity and warmth through awkward guitar riffs, bright pops of chiming bells, or lucid, emotive crescendos on his piano. As though reflecting his real-life story, Sakamoto revels in finding hope and optimism in his collaborations. On another sombre track, he even repeatedly drops and retrieves a small plastic ball sharply on the piano’s interior, its elastic hollowness serving as an unexpected counterpoint to break through the thick fog of bleak notes that reverberate. 

But he also proves dexterous, as in another track when he layers wailing guitar upon peaks and troughs of a growly bass undertone, and there is no auditory relief in sight from the ringing. Noto is more than just second fiddle, as he delicately fine-tunes the microsounds and pares back on the techno elements at all the right moments. Together he and Sakamoto produce a movable canvas on which to project our own narratives and movie scenes. The tracks – tremulous, ephemeral and luminous -- could almost write the scenes themselves if we sit back and allow them. 

In a clear nod to the project that brought them many accolades, their last encore item for the evening is a revisit of the main theme to The Revenant – the haunting, stark cloud of rapidly swelling electro music so evocatively rendered. But in tonight’s version, Sakamoto adds an almost haphazard, discordant layer above Noto’s barren, hopeless landscape – the former a mixture of screeches, guitar riffs, objects knocking and chiming, and piano strings caressed like the lips of Tibetan singing bowls. 

We set aside our brief moment of incredulity and let the master demonstrate his still childlike wonder, creativity and generosity.