** Ryuichi Sakamoto

CINEMAGE

(Sony Classical)

* Ryuichi Sakamoto

BTTB

(Sony Classical)

Back in the day, movies had minimal credits: the star, the writer, the producer and the director, and the guy who wrote the music. In those days we thought of it as "background music," not a "score." A handful of masters -- Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone, for example -- got noticed, the former for heightening the drama of a scene, the latter for adding an ironic distance between the viewer and the on-screen action. But most movie music went unnoticed, as it was supposed to.

On Cinemage, Ryuichi Sakamoto revisits and reinvents some of the film music he's written since 1982, and the visual element is missed. There are bright spots, including David Sylvian's anguished vocals on "Forbidden Colours," but most of the pieces here -- "Last Emperor," "Little Buddha," "Wuthering Heights" -- either drown in a romantic sweep of percussion and brass or try to seduce your emotions with string charts that pant and heave like the breasts of a romance novel's heroine. The art of film music is a subtle one, and when a score calls attention to itself, it isn't doing its job. Sakamoto's works so well in its proper context that it's not really worth hearing any other way.

The Sakamoto solo piano compositions that are collected on the new BTTB (i.e., "Back to the Basics") have, oddly, the same problem -- except they've got no film to fall back on. This is largely new-agey background music, with a bit of Mozart keyboard twinkle here and a bit of Satie-like dissonance there. All in all, it lacks the tension and humor that have made Sakamoto's pop work so inventive and enjoyable.

-- J. Poet