RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, ALVA NOTO - Conversations 12

Three years after the passing of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto makes public the artistic exchange of what could have been and never was. What failed to become a new chapter in the two artists' fruitful collaboration instead gave rise to “12″ (Milan Records, 2023), the Japanese composer's testament album. A record able to capture the daily reality of illness, the relationship with the eternal, and the fragility of the human spirit at the outer limits of existence.
“12″ is an extraordinary, moving work, a delicate piece suspended between the fleeting harmonies of the piano and the quiet reverberations of synthesizers. A collection of crepuscular pieces which, in their preliminary sketches, never managed to blend as intended with the minimal electronics. Carsten Nicolai himself writes that “at first, every intervention seemed almost out of place.” An insoluble cramp that led to the project being abandoned.

It should be said right away that the delicate luminosity of the “V.I.R.U.S.” pentalogy (including the splendid “Summvs” and “Vrioon”) shows just how much complicity, mutual esteem and shared desire for cross-contamination there has always been between the two artists; but “12” is ontologically a different matter. We might link it to the whole suggestion of Tanizaki's “In Praise of Shadows,” to the austere, detached atmospheres of Japanese tradition, where ritual, silence and discretion are the aesthetic and spiritual foundations of existence. An existence that, even in full awareness of its final moments, refuses to give up a dignified composure.
So it's only natural to ask: what's the point of releasing a work that, stripped of the tracks themselves, risks being nothing more than a “noisified” version of “12”?

Let's take a paradigmatic example: “Conversation 3,” which corresponds to “20211201” from “12.” The original is a touching piece. The piano's progression and the ethereal widening of the background pad hang on a heavy, mechanical breathing, as dense as the bellows of a ventilator. In its reworking, the track is flooded with electronic notations, beatings and shattered textures that act like cathode-ray interference on a black-and-white image. Or take “Conversation 8.” The original, “20220302 – Sarabande,” is a deeply tender piano soliloquy, with no synthesizers at all. In an atmosphere of subtle wonder, the stillness seems to gently unravel the pain, unfurling a light veil of suspension and creating an illusory, clear afternoon relief. The black electronic reverb of its counterpart adds a shadow of unease behind the composition, deepening its mood. A weight that makes explicit everything left unsaid.

In short, this is a work that suffers monstrously from its derivative nature. There are also some restrained moments, such as the four movements of “Conversation 9” and the delicate “Conversation 11,” where the electronic touches gently rise and fade around the touch of the strings. Unfortunately, though, they seem to work on autopilot (we're still talking about Alva Noto, after all), never quite managing to add real value to the original.
“For a long time, releasing this music seemed impossible. The loss had been too sudden and the emotional bond too deep,” admits the Austrian artist. It's a moving admission, and because of that one can ultimately understand the desire to return and reckon with the memory of a departed friend, to break an unbearable silence. What's harder to justify, perhaps, is a practice that almost never works in the history of music: the philological retrieval of discarded sketches.

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26/09/2026