• LIMITED EDITION OF 1000 INDIVIDUALLY NUMBERED COPIES ON BLACK & WHITE MARBLED VINYL

Somewhere between an Eric Satie still life and Jerry Goldsmith’s noir-jazz score for Chinatown exists the coolly emotional and subtly effervescent yet earthen music for the film Minamata from composer and instrumentalist Ryuichi Sakamoto. Starting with its gently halting piano opening theme and traveling through quietly whining atmospheric battles between sequencers, breathy voices, and real-time strings (“Landscape,” “Chisso Co.”), tonic glitch-hop riffs (“The Boy”) and their sinister equivalent (“Hidden Data”), opulent cello runs (“Boy and Camera”), and burnt-edged, electro-ambient (with squeezebox) scowls (“Into Japan”), the sonic monologue behind the true-life events of aged American war photographer Eugene Smith (played by Johnny Depp in director Andrew Levitas’ gritty film) documenting the effects of mercury poisoning on a coastal town in Japan is exactly what we’ve come to expect from latter-day Sakamoto.