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.
[from bleep.com]