I happened to browse the Japan I-Tunes Store Top 100 Album chart the other day and came across something puzzling:  eight or nine previously unknown albums attributed to Sakamoto Ryuichi, all bearing as titles only the name of a Japanese city and a date -- e.g., "Fukuoka o4/05/09" (#4 on the chart as of this morning).   

   The mystery was solved a few days later, when I discovered  this fine profile of Sakamoto in the Japan Times.  He is recording and immediately releasing every gig on his current concert tour of Japan.   He's apparently also experimenting with the use of audience noise as part of his music this tour.  On one song, for example, spectators are encouraged to snap cellphone photographs so that all of the clicks and beeps create a background soundscape against which the music emerges.  This all builds on experiments from his latest album, out of noise, released last month in Japan. 

   This burst of creativity comes on the heels of the Yellow Magic Orchestra reunion concerts in Europe last summer.   Sakamoto's former mates in that band, Hosono Haruomi and Takahashi Yukihiro, have also been quite active in recent months.  I'm especially enamored of the debut CD by Takahashi's new band, pupa. 

   And everyone says that the cherry blossoms are just lovely this year in Tokyo.  It's spring, folks:  the season for regeneration.