Remix albums have a spotty track record. They are frequently promotional gambits aimed at illuminating the original artist in flattering light bounced off the hired talent. In the case of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async remodels, the bar is set significantly higher. Sakamoto is one of electronic music’s living legends, a relentless innovator whose oeuvre winds through the synth pop of Yellow Magic Orchestra, glitching ambient experiments for Raster-Noton, Hollywood film scores, and music for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. The original async followed a period of radiology treatment for throat cancer, and the album feels infused with the penetrating urgency of an artist facing his own mortality. remodels responds to this weightiness by assembling a multi-generational collection of composers, synth artists, and underground renegades, each of whom owes a debt to Sakamoto’s work. The musicians salute their forebear and the listeners survey the scope of his influence; the effect is not unlike a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. And, as with such awards, the async remodels glitters with aspiration and emotion, and yet rings slightly hollow.
Let’s start with the good stuff: There are some excellent remixes on this album. The best are split between Sakamoto’s collaborators and younger artists with fresh perspectives. Alva Noto’s reimagining of “disintegration” bathes the original’s bristing severity in the spectral, hovering atmospherics and turn-of-the-millenium digital palette the duo is known for. Compared to their Satie-inflected 2002 outing Vrioon, this remix lunges with aggression. Similarly, Fennesz’s take on “solari” infuses the original with unabashed romanticism and gives it a ghostly, emptied out ending. Get yourself a nice pair of headphones and crank the volume—the insectoid water droplet pings at 2:20 move the track’s central theme from a roaring summit view to the depths of the sewers.
Elsewhere, Arca’s “async” is a lurching cyberpunk opera in which he sounds entirely at home. The original is barely perceptible in the fray of smeared vocals, ephemeral sound effects, and clipped trap drums. Yves Tumor, on the other hand, retains key elements of “ZURE” while framing it as an invocation. A woman’s voice, just out of earshot, whispers in the background: “You’re so much stronger than you think you are right now.” Many of these remixes aim for haunting, but only Tumor’s sounds properly haunted.
S U R V I V E’s contribution is the lone dud: a half-baked wash of synth textures and unearned bombast. The rest simply struggle to cohere, or cohere a little too much. Across these mixes there’s a surprising uniformity of tone and timbre, a kind of austere grandeur with lots of high end reverb trails, big percussion hits, and a sense of frozen futurism. Sakamoto glided across genres and eras with an ease rarely seen in artists not named Brian Eno, yet only Electric Youth’s gently driving remix of “andata” nods to Sakamoto’s pop side. Another quality the duo’s track doesn’t share with the rest: It’s the sole entry to feature a woman in a producer’s chair. In 2018’s musical landscape, surely Laurel Halo, Holly Herndon, Suzanne Ciani, Fatima Al Qadiri, Elysia Crampton, Nkisi, Pan Daijing, Pharmakon, Jlin, and Stellar OM Source—just a few of the women operating prominently at the forefront of experimental electronic music whose signatures dovetail with the styles explored here—weren’t all unavailable.
Toggling between async and remodels, it’s hard to miss the contrast between the stark force of the original and the restrained reverence of its follow-up. Sakamoto is one of the greats. Here he’s surrounded by an exemplary cast, including many artists groundbreaking in their own right. But remodels isn’t an album made by a master confronting life’s most unfathomable inevitability. And without that, it’s not quite sure what it wants to be. Though worthy, at times enjoyable, and well-intentioned, as a standalone work it’s uneven and hemmed in. Its greatest tribute will be to lead listeners back to the source.
