In 1988, celebrated manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo unleashed an animated feature film upon an unsuspecting world. It was a mesmerising fusion of cyber-punk aesthetics with deep philosophical and scientific theories, brought to life with the most astounding and mind blowing animation ever witnessed. It was, of course, Akira. Being arguably the most important animated feature created since 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Akira ushered in a new era of film making techniques and showed the true potential of animation as an effective medium for communicating a mature narrative to an audience alienated by the perceived childishness of Western animated features. Putting both its glorious visuals and strong writing aside though, one of the most important aspects of its success came in the form its breath-taking original score, created by none other than Japan's own Geinoh Yamashirogumi.
The group was born from an assemblage of students attending various universities who came together for mixed choir in 1953, though it was not until 1966 when Shoji Yamashiro assumed control of the group that they began to expand, to challenge the recognised limitations of choral work by studying and implementing aspects of world music into their repertoire. In 1974, the group changed their name to Geinoh Yamashirogumi, and set to work studying a vast array of ethnic music and digital audio techniques, which resulted in a slew of album releases between 1976 and 1986, when the album Ecophony Rinne brought them to the attention of Otomo himself, who promptly commissioned them to create the soundtrack to his debut animated feature.
There are striking similarities between Ecophony Rinne and the score that they would later produce; musically, it features a heavy emphasis on choral work and percussion, while thematically, the album is based around four movements that depict a life cycle from birth, through death, to eventual rebirth. The film, on the other hand, is based around the possibility of latent knowledge, or power, residing with the very cells that give us life, a remnant of the various stages of the evolutionary process that brought us here; an energy within us that even after death does not dissipate, but rather evolves into an alternative form in another space and time. Evidently, Otomo saw them as a perfect accompaniment to his artistic vision, and unsurprisingly, he was correct.
When Geinoh Yamashirogumi accepted to proposal of creating the soundtrack, they were delighted to discover that the only restriction placed upon them was that of a time constraint, they were given just six months to create the music for the film, but no budget was allocated, they were instead given a blank cheque to pursue whatever artistic vision that they saw fit-though Otomo himself requested that they create a Yamashirogumi style of music, rather than a dramatic one. The film was to be anything but by-the-numbers, and its score should also reflect this.
