Garden Of Shadows And Light

Black vinyl
Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Toop seem to have followed similar trajectories over their many decades in music. At roughly the same age, their individual ventures from pop into avant-garde have continuously run parallel to each other’s, and so Garden of Shadows and Light — recorded live in concert in London, August 2018 — feels like the culmination of two like-minds finally coming together. The approach is as simple as it is alien; Sakamoto’s inside-piano work plucks out haunting music box melodies, flitting between melodic ideas as Toop adorns the scene with distant scrapes and wails from his prepared lap steel