fullmoon

Fullmoon is one of Sakamoto's most luminous pieces — the title immediately suggesting the clear, cool light of a full moon, and the music fulfilling that promise with an unusual combination of openness and precision. The piano writing has a crystalline quality, the harmonics hanging in the air like light on still water, the melodic gestures tracing slow arcs across the texture. There is nothing urgent here, nothing that demands resolution — the music exists in a sustained state of illuminated stillness, the harmonic language unresolved in the most beautiful possible way. Sakamoto understood better than almost any composer the emotional territory that exists between genres — this piece is neither classical nor ambient nor new age but something that encompasses and transcends all three. Best listened to under actual moonlight, though it creates its own.