Japanese Sound

This marks another appearance of the "Editor's Discretion" tag in the Japometer above.  Last time it was used to mark something that was "100%" traditional.  This time, it marks something that's not very Japanesque, but it's something I wanted to highlight anyway because in some sense it reflects the spirit of this blog.

MechWarrior 2 / Mercinaries / Ghost Bear's Legacy is a series of Battletech-based mecha simulation games for the PC.  The game envisioned a sci-fi world where human civilization has expanded to nearby star systems, while reverting to feudalism and (therefore) descending into a perpetual state of war between lords & clans.  It's a world where old ideas akin to bushido and chivalry are expressed through sci-fi battles and formal, ritualistic duels between battlemechs-- single-seat, oversized bipedal tanks that are often billed as an expression of the warrior within.

Game Audio on the PC

This game appeared shortly after the Rebel Assault and 7th Guest-led surge of "CD-ROM" games in the mid-90s.  Like many CD-ROM games of its time, it featured a video intro and PCM Audio CD ("Red Book") music.

In the PC world, the wide adoption of CD-ROM drives enabled a sort-of golden age for PC game music.  PC games previously relied on General MIDI, as interpreted by the uninspiring sound of Yamaha's FM chips or whatever happened to reside on the end user's sound card.  Unlike the console world, where standardized sound chips enabled strong "VGM" traditions, the PC music culture (the module/tracker music scene) did not carry over to the PC gaming world.  Only a handful of games like Star Control 2 used module music. Everything else fell back to the lowest common denominator of General MIDI, because it was computationally "inexpensive" to implement and took very little space in memory.  CD-ROMs blew the doors open to real PCM music, allowing for unrestricted production value that would stream off the disc and play back the same on every system.

Conjuring a Feudal Past for a Future War

In a race to imbue games with a more "cinematic" quality (a dull race that continues to the present day), Activision's developers were looking for someone to compose an orchestral moviemusic-like score.

Jeehun Hwang, a tech assistant at Activision with some (pop band & academic) music background, thought it "wasn't what the project needed, but that's what [the producers] wanted."  Via Sound on Sound Magazine:

We [Activision w/ Jeehun Hwang as music advisor] listened to all the demo tapes and there was only one composer who we thought did orchestral scores well enough, so we signed him on to the project. However, there were problems: the music didn't come over how Activision wanted it, but no-one could convey how they wanted it to change. So finally I said, "Look, I'll put some songs together for you that I think might work and if you like them you can use them."

I had never even composed music that didn't have lyrics!  ...But I just did what I thought would work, all on a Korg X2's internal sequencer. MechWarrior 2 is set in the future and is basically about clans fighting each other with hi-tech robotic weapons. I was creating lots of tribal sounding music, but also flavoured with out-of-this-world futuristic sounds. After I'd written a few songs I took them in and there was this big meeting with everyone, including the head of the company, where first they played all the music the other guy had done and then they played my music. To my surprise I got a standing ovation!

SoS: Knowing a good thing when they heard it, Activision set Jeehun up with a computer and a small budget for equipment. Using Opcode's Studio Vision sequencing software, the X2 and a new Roland JV1080 with the Orchestral and World expansion cards, he scored the entire game.  His score was unconventional to say the least. Streets ahead of other video game music of the time, it seamlessly blended orchestral and contemporary sounds with elements of both classical music and hip hop.

I was just trying to be experimental, and as I didn't have any experience writing for orchestra I just built the songs up with the sounds I liked, without adhering to one particular style.

It sold millions of copies all around the world, was named Best Game of the Year, and I got Best Music of the Year in a lot of the game publications.  Activision were literally flooded with e-mail from people commenting on the music, many saying they'd have bought the game just for the soundtrack.

MechWarrior 2 and its expansions had an inspired soundtrack that nostalgic old PC gamers still remember fondly.  The mix of tribal and electronic drums with orchestral string and horn sections evoked the image of lumbering, god-like giants on a distant battlefield, which contrasted brilliantly with the sci-fi gameplay.  Successive MechWarrior/Battletech games, like much of the rest of the gaming world, would lose its inspired, memorable music.

One reason this game came to mind as an article for Japanese Sound is the fact that an already well-hyped MechWarrior "reboot" is on the way.  For many fans, one of the big questions is whether it will feature the suspenseful, sim-like gameplay of the old MechWarrior 2 & 3 or the fast-paced arcade gameplay of Mechwarrior 4 and the MechAssault games.  For me, an additional question is whether or not its music will stay true to the individualistic electronic-orchestral-tribal blend of the seminal MW2, or default to the usual indescript moviemusic mishmash we've already heard in every other game released in the past decade.

The official description bills Asura's self-titled debut as a concept album about, "as taken from the work of Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa, a dissolution of self and environment in the face of strong emotion."  Unfortunately I don't have the exposure to Miyazawa's poetry to expand on that particular description.

At best I have learned of Kenji Miyazawa incidentally and seen a trio of movies/adaptations in the past.  In some way, I feel that Miyazawa is a fitting description for Asura's album.  Miyazawa expressed Buddhist ideas in stories that took place in (sometimes nostalgic,  sometimes fantastical) European-themed settings-- in other words, eastern ideas in an amalgam of western imagery.

Asura does something similar.  Intentionally or not, he expresses a Buddhist-derived Japanese aesthetic in his music called "wabi-sabi", which in short can be described as "rustic beauty" or "the beauty of imperfection", an aesthetic appreciation for the imperfection of man-made things, and their inevitable decay over time.  The appreciation of decay and impermanence is one of Buddhism's main contributions to the Japanese aesthetic mindset.  For instance, many historical buildings are not "preserved" in the sense that we preserve our monuments in the west.  Every few decades they are demolished and reassembled in the same way.  The expression of the designs are preserved, but the buildings themselves (by design) are allowed to fall into disrepair again and again.  Wabi-sabi basically states that natural flaws and impermanence add beauty because it speaks more to the human condition.

Back to the point, Asura's album exudes "rustic beauty", with the constant addition of vinyl-like hisses, crackles, distortion, lo-fi EQ'ing and so on, giving the album an "aged" feel.  Its combination of Japan-esque wooden sounds with orchestral/jazz instruments and digital production summons a world that exists between east and west, past and present.

Lo-fi aesthetics are something I've been noticing more and more in the age of digital production & internet distribution.  While vinyl hisses are both natural and hip in traditional hiphop (which is often sampled from old funk/soul vinyl records), current-gen artists like Flying Lotus have been taking the lo-fi aesthetic to new extremes with artificially injected vinyl hiss loops, layers of distortion, exaggerated compression/sidechaining artifacts and "wonky" timing.  It's as if you're hearing a lavishly produced track printed on an aged record, played on the most out-of-whack, out-of-control system ever.

At the other end of the energy spectrum, if you cruise through today's hipster music and netlabel material, you will find a vast, vast ocean of lo-fi ambient and rustic, simplistic "folktronica".

In the much wider mainstream space, vinyl records as a format for the home have had a great resurgence-- not among the nostalgic, but among young people looking for a more tangible way to collect and play back music.

These trends speak to how the computerization of music, and the mechanically precise hi-fi aesthetics that computers (or otherwise digitally-controlled gear) tend to impose, has lost much of its novelty.  It seems the new novelty is the exaggeration of imperfection by producers and the demand for impermanent mediums by fans, to both inform us that music is a human tradition and to let us imagine that it has a tangible, fleeting beauty.

It seems like everyone is looking for a little wabi-sabi in their otherwise digital life.

No, it's not bursting with production wizardry seeing that it's a simple vocal+piano track with an Okinawan sound, but it's an interesting moment from an interesting show, where a protagonist has a highly visual near-death experience.  It's Obokuri Eeumi (Obtain Bearing) by Ikue Asazaki, from the album "Utabautayun".  It appears in a scene from Samurai Champloo, which for most people needs little introduction.  In its heyday, it was one of those "I don't watch anime, but I do watch..." shows in the United States at least.

As TinyRedLeaf writes,

"The song, as I recall, is sung in a dialect and style common to the Ryukyu Islands. Besides Asazaki Ikue, there is also the much younger Chitose Hajime, who also sings in the same style. She performed the first ED of Blood+, Kataritsugu koto, which I enjoyed. To my chagrin, though, some friends have told me that it sounds like an old-fashioned Hokkien love song.

Which should not be surprising, actually, considering how close Taiwan is to the tail end of the Ryukyu chain. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see how the musical tradition could have hopped a little further south, and into a sinicised environment.

And, oh, the lyrics to Obokuri Eemui can be found here. As you can see, while the tone of the song suited Mugen's "death scene" perfectly, its deeper message is completely unrelated, telling a tale, instead, of heartbreaking poverty.

Don't know why, but the Japanese do seem to have a penchant for catharsis, heh."

When trying to identify "Japan-esque" music, it's sometimes hard to go by the presence of ensemble taiko drums alone.  Mixed with other indiscriminate "tribal" drumming, taiko drums have become very common in modern soundtrack work. Everyone is used to hearing that sound and it's no longer associated with anything aside from an abstract dramatic cue.

In order to play up the (literally) otherworldly settings & cultures of the recent Battlestar Galactica TV series, the music of the show sometimes employed a smorgasboard of folk/ethnic instruments and sounds.  One of the things I remembered was its recognizable (i.e. real) taiko ensemble drumming.

There was a moment late in the series where shamisens and a shakuhachi joined the taiko for an epic jam, and my jaw hit the floor.  I'll love them forever for doing that-- musically acknowleging one of the cultures behind the show's smorgasbord sound, and recontexualizing a taiko-shamisen-shakuhachi jam in a way that isn't evoking ninja & samurai silliness.

Usually the "microsound" (or "clicks and cuts") genre casts the impression of highly abstract computer music.  This one is different-- it's vivid and picturesque, while still being identifiably microsound.

"Rurihiko Hara is a young Japanese artist who delivers us [the netlabel Natural Media] a great album mainly based on piano sounds which are digitally processed in order to describe scenarios, bridges, waterways and landscapes of his native country."

What more needs to be said?  It definitely works.  Without having read the description beforehand, I already felt as if I was taking a stroll through a Japanese forest pass as I skimmed the tracks at random.  I've since listened to the album several times.

For all the production wizardry and density of the kind of music I make, microsound is something I'll never be able to mass-produce aside from the odd experiment.  My production relies on sheer maximalism in order to paint pictures, so I envy those who are able to create vivid, immersive music through elegant minimalism.  That kind of production is deceptively difficult.

Arabesque Pond exudes elegance and minimalism.  It's able to conjure forests and bridges and streams of water with processed piano snippets and filtered white noise.  There are moments where even the silence, the space in between the blips and pads of sound, seems to be an integral part of the music, bringing to mind this blog's previous spotlight on Michael Doherty.

Arabesque pond clocks in at 31 minutes + a very fitting remix as a closer.  Take a listen:

• Archive.org page | MP3 zip | FLAC & Ogg

It's no mistake that anime and game soundtracks will be featured here often.  Since Japanese Sound highlights music that conjures old/mythological Japan with modern production sensibilities, soundtracks for works that also summon such worlds fit the bill.

Anyway, Mushishi is an anime series that takes place in an imaginary era of Japan's past (hybrid edo/meiji).  Ginko is a travelling specialist in western clothes, visiting isolated homes & villages and offering his services to those afflicted by mushi, a primal class of lifeform that most people can't see or perceive.  Many of the stories evoke shintoism and folklore-- Mushishi imagines a world where invisible lifeforms flow through everything and occasionally materialize into illnesses and mysterious natural phenomena.

I've watched the show and poured through the lengthy DVD interviews, some of which get really in-depth and give you a sense of how much Mushishi is not the usual anime production.  It feels more like a prestige piece, a work of cultural value as much as entertainment, especially in the way its high production value manifests in unconventional ways.  In other words, there are no explosive exhibition fights & battles in this one, or flashy moving-background special effect scenes.

The color coordinator goes on about the unusual number of colors in Mushishi's palette.  The compositing team talks about the meticulous and subtle gradients that span across every element in each frame.  The mushi creatures are often animated at a lucious 24-drawings-per-second ("on the 1s", extremely rare in anime).

Likewise, the music composer in the above interview talks about the unusual freedom he had in creating the show's music.  He went through a process of gathering random and sometimes unique folk instruments in order to create a sort of fantasy folk sound for a fantastical show.

"The music didn't have to be a track [that accompanied on-screen events].  [...] I didn't have such a framework to work with this time.  [...] First, I gathered instruments that I've never seen or heard of before and groped for a way to create music suitable for Mushishi.

When ideas came to me, I mixed them up to see what would come out of it.  It was a real hodgepodge.  I couldn't predict what ideas would flow out.  [I imagined the world of Mushishi] and played in front of those scenes.

It's like I've gone back to being an amateur.  Rather than working, all I'm doing is satisfying my desires and interests while making music that fit."

Isn't that the dream? :)

• Soundtrack: YouTube | Import CDs | Steal
• Anime: YouTube subtitled | YouTube dubbed | Buy | Steal
• Beware that the US & JP Blu Ray versions are upscales

IDM pioneers Autechre collaborating with a J-pop singer on a folk song remix?  You know you love that shit.  You're imagining a full-length Autechre J-pop album right now.

• Import CD

This is the blend of classic and modern that we all come to this blog for, I hope.  The snippet of music on the YouTube video above does not do it justice.

It's classic because of its expert use of traditional Japanese instruments and its expression of Japanese aesthetics.

It's modern because it comes from a real music producer unafraid of challenging and enhaning those dry, traditional configurations with studio effects, sfx, ambient soundscapes, synthesizers, and the occasional modern chord progression.  The result is a beautiful and eerie take on Japanese imperial court music.  So powerful and vivid was its imagery of old Japan that it compelled me to roll my own.

The producer in question is Haruomi Hosono, member of the seminal electropop band Yellow Magic Orchestra and overall prolific guy.  In the 80s, he created two anime soundtracks, and both of them for Gisaburou Sugii movies (here's the other one).

I remember listening to the soundtrack for months before I tracked down the film, and it actually surpassed my expectations.  From what I read it was supposed to be a dry, academic film, but it was actually very beautiful and enigmatic much like its soundtrack.

Here is your pre-supplied thought process for acquiring the music album:

1. Check its going rate on eBay
2. F--- that, hook me up with a torrent or a direct download

When I think of SoundCloud, I think of hipsters spinning hipster music.  I was a little surprised -- pleasantly surprised -- when Michael Doherty started contributing tracks to the Japanese Sound group.

"Michael Andrew Doherty is a Colorado-based composer and performer who specializes in silence, listening, and the Japanese bamboo flute, shakuhachi. His musicking is an exploration into a "true" minimalism, utilizing silence (jp. ma) as an essential element.  While living in a small village located in a remote valley of the Rocky Mountains, he began to explore the Japanese aesthetic of ma (silence/negative space), elemental to the traditional Zen repertoire for shakuhachi (honkyoku). [...]"

No, not spinning fresh beats, but a musician who is very much into performing and learning "the way of" one Japanese instrument.  The sparsity of this one is nice:

• Doherty on SoundCrizzab | Homepage & Blog

This is the first, and likely the last, tasteful use of Voiceroid Tsukuyomi Ai you will ever hear.

Per Van Per is a pretty interesting artist who began with painting (professionally) and expanded to serving eccentric and dense soundscapes he calls "Organic Ambient".  Much of it seems to tie in aesthetically with his paintings.  While at times his songs can sound a little homogenous, I have nothing but respect for artists who devote themselves to manifesting their bizarre inner worlds with everything they have.

• Per Van Per on SoundCrib | Homepage w/ art gallery
• Organic Ambient group moderated by Per Van Per