After their first collaborative release "Ocean Fire", the spiritual heat which sparkled from the musical meeting between Ryuichi Sakamoto and talented Californian musician Christopher Willits (many consider him a true pioneer of many methodologies for digital signal processing as well as for the redifinition of guitar within contemporary digital music) sounds unaltered on the occasion of their second (totally instrumental) one "Ancient Future", an album based on a series of piano pieces the Japanese maestro sent to Willits just after their first collaboration and focused on different phases of the turbulent inner journey in search of the meaning of existence most of people experience during their life and sometimes lasting a whole life. The delicate sonic undulations by Christopher, which sound completely carried by the tides generated by Ryuichi's piano strokes (try to follow the ultra-low bass line as well the intangible guitar tonal stream in the initial tracks "Reticent Reminiscence" and "Abondoned Silence"), before opposing some resistance against the rarefied melodies on "I Don't Want To Understand", a track whose almost inaudible noise of a train running over rail tracks could evoke an escape from any attempt of disentangling a gordian knot, and through the glacial dissociation of "Levitation", gradually cling tightly to musical shapes by Sakamoto with warm arpeggios before the melancholic tranquillity of final resolution evoked by "Completion", whereas any troublesome stinker which followed the multidirectional movement of many curls of smoke, soaked in some glass or convulsively imitated the chaotic route of any particle in the universe disappears within self-knowledge. Younger listeners maybe will not understand the enchanting and somewhat controversial balance between musical elements as well as the sonic inner metalanguage of "Ancient Future" where the whirring of the machines blurs into a human breath, but many adult listeners will appreciate this workout on the membrane between will and fate, which cannot but come from two really mature (both artistic and just human) personalities.