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Q: How did you get involved with this project?
I met Otomo at OG. He asked me to create music for this film. Both Otomo and Kawasaki have good taste in music. I also share some preferences with them. That's why it was very comfortable for me working on this film. Otomo himself didn't give me any suggestions and left it all up to me. His trust was both a pressure and an encouragement to me. I really enjoyed this work anyway.
Q: What kind of music did you intend to compose?
This is a hardboiled story. I happened to feel like making something hard-boiled too. That was a nice coincidence. I made music for films such as The Strangest Stories and Night Head. They also had very dark themes. This time I tried to make music that focused on the "mind" aspect, and I succeeded in reaching for a different sound. Technically speaking, I have been trying to make new music by adding cyber space-like noise on the top of regular orchestral music. I consider the music for Spriggan the most sophisticated work of its kind.
Q: I heard that you used a PMC system for the film.
Yes, we did as monitoring equipment for recording. It creates vivid high notes, smooth low notes, harmony which is usually only produced by space and time differences, and big hall-like acoustic effects. The small recording studios in Japan are not good enough to record film music for feature films. This system might create a fake big space, but we surely need this kind of consideration. I heard that people have been using this system for recording in Hollywood on films such as Titanic.
Q: Why did you choose SΣju as the vocalist for the theme song?
I definitely wanted a singer who has an incredible range so that I wouldn't have to worry about technical and physical limitations when I was composing the theme song. That was a very crucial element. Plus, I started paying a lot of attention to Asian singers about two years ago. SΣju has a background in Peking Opera and Tibetan music, and I thought she was the most suitable singer for Spriggan. She could hit vivid high notes and did an excellent job. I added a David Bowie-like low voice to her song and a female American singer sang a Chinese song in a European manner in the background. All those different elements harmonized very well, and I think this song matched the film nicely.
