ANCIENT FUTURE is the second collaboration between musician 坂本龍一 and electronic music pioneer Christopher Willits.

After their first collaboration, Ocean Fire was released in 2008, Sakamoto built on several piano compositions he sent to Willits.

Ancient Future functions as a work that encompasses the entire trajectory of creation, fulfilling one's destiny and all that we experience in this world, and the inner struggles, unraveling of problems, and acceptance of answers.
The cycle of six pieces is a kind of "story" that has a story to be told, a part of life to be explored. The six song cycles move back and forth between certain narratives, as works that tell part of a story that needs to be told and a life that needs to be explored.

The album opens with the relentless energy of "Retentive Reminiscence," and then surrenders itself deeply to the inward music of "Abandoned Silence" and "I Don't Want to Understand. Then, "Levitation" dissociates the audience into cold, disjointed pieces.
The flow of the album comes to a close with "Completion," a song filled with serenity.
This perhaps represents the kind of experience in which one finally realizes oneself.

Despite the conceptual coherence, as the album title "Ancient Future" suggests, contradictions intervene at the heart of the album, and opposites appear within each song.
For example, there are loops of noise and feedback in the background of delicate melodies that gradually ripple across the surface of a calm lake. But the contradictions are not conflicts at all; they come together to create the logic that is the essence of the album: that we are a collection of experiences and knowledge, of light and shadow, of positive and negative.