Cinemage

1	Forbidden Colours / David Sylvian 4:48
2	The Last Emperor 5:17
3	Little Buddha 8:48
4	Wuthering Heights 7:03
5	Replica 4:50
6	El Mar Mediterrani / DJ Spooky 17:16

Barnes & Noble

This sampler of Ryuichi Sakamoto's film music is a much more likely follow-up to DISCORD, a four-movement work for orchestra and electronics, than to his concurrently released solo piano album, BTTB. CINEMAGE begins exactly where it should, with "Forbidden Colours," the main theme from the 1983 film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," the music that first put Sakamoto on the map as a film composer. The album concludes with "El Mar Mediterrani," composed for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. In between are selections from "The Last Emperor" (which won an Academy Award in 1989), "Wuthering Heights," and his string-drenched music to "Little Buddha," which all reveal the composer's gift for painting evocative soundscapes. For a pop music pioneer, Sakamoto's film scores offer few innovations. But by reveling in the familiar, he creates music with its own pictorial associations and controls it to extremely effective ends. Ken Smith

All Music Guide

Because this set features some of Sakamoto's most famous film scores, it doesn't delve into the ethereal and experimental nature of some of his more esoteric work. It's pretty conventional by comparison (it's actually billed as an album of pieces composed to accompany visual events), which might make it a good starting point for novices. The textured and atmospheric pieces here -- taken from such films as Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and "visual events" like the opening ceremonies of the 1992 summer Olympics -- lean toward the spiritual, preventing the album from ever grounding itself as a thematic whole. Michael Gallucci