Project "Boyhood Skies"
Notes On Project "Boyhood Skies"
Tracks
o Dear Lessons (Piano Version)
o Dear Lessons (Detuned Percussion Version)
The "Boyhood Skies" series is our tributes to Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto, both of whom are two of the boyhood idols for both TI and me.
When I knew Sakamoto-san suffered from severe cancer in 2022, I planned to make some tribute work to him, which is the two versions of "Dear Lessons."
After creating "Dear Lessons," I was reminded of Sakamoto-san's radio show in the 1980s and then I wrote another piece to feature it in January 2023, which is the track called "Demo Shows." At the time we had no plan to make them a series or album at all (because I didn't think we could).
Then, on 11 January 2023 Takahashi-san passed away, shockingly to us. Soon after finishing writing "Demo Shows" I started to write the next tribute piece to him, "Let Me Hear About You." Just after the release of the track, Sakamoto-san passed away on 28 March 2023.
The more we remembered about them, the more melancholic we got. As a result, we made two more works called "Looking Up At The Clouds" and "Silence After You Leave."
Finally, remembering the two artists' co-works, we made the piece called "Urbanscapes."
As you might or might not notice, these tracks use a lot of tonalities and the 4-4 time, quite unlike FMT. Even having melodies is very rare in FMT's works. Yet, instead, we put many of FMT's weirdest styles into them such as dissonances, strange instrumentations/progressions, atonality (in part), polyrhythms (a little bit), complex rhythms, Gating and samples like Musique Concrète. But anyway, the production made me recognise how much the two great artists influenced me. They did TI too, I think, maybe much more.
In other words, we didn't copy their music even though we did absorb some of it. Rather, what we highlighted is something inside us that they've influenced us on as well as our sentiment. Perhaps I've never tried to express my feelings with music so much as in "Boyhood Skies."
Before kicking off this project we were working on a different album called "Placid Wanderings" but paused the production and went for this, as if we headed somewhere else in the middle of the trip. It's quite interesting to me that there are many factors of inter-infection between these series.
The time between the start and release has been exceptionally short for this series. "Boyhood..." has a lot in common with "Placid..." in terms of the musical characteristics (despite numerous differences, of course).
In fact, we were creating the two tracks ("Dear Lessons" and "Demo Shows") to show our huge respect and love to ill Sakamoto-san, wishing he could be any better, but happened to elevate them to a project by Takahashi-san's death. I intended to put the Piano Version of "Dear Lessons" into the "Placid..." album but happened to spin the series of the tributes out. That's why the tracks from "Boyhood..." and "Placid..." are to be released nearly in parallel.
Just before the final release of this project, for which "Silence After You Leave" and "Urbanscapes" were nearly ready, another news of Sakamoto-san passing away came through.
As in the sonnet in Demo Shows, we "can't touch anymore." We love you guys, rest in peace.
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