Album info: VGMdb
Listening: YouTube (single video), Spotify
Info
In 2012, composer Wataru Ishibashi released two albums digitally which would end up being his final albums before he sadly passed away in 2014. Both of them were available for purchase on multiple platforms, including iTunes and Amazon, but unfortunately since then the first one’s only still buyable on one store (mora) and the second one is completely unavailable to buy. You can still listen to them on Spotify, though, so they’re not completely offline.
Ishibashi began writing music under the name “misoneko,” some of which was published in the magazine MSX·FAN in the early 1990s. He later switched to the name “mirawi” in the late ’90s, which he’d use for his doujin and freelance works for the rest of his life (including this album). He also fit in a few years working professionally for Nihon Falcom and SuperSweep before going freelance around 2006 or so.
I stopped listening to Falcom music many years ago because I found most of it kind of boring, and honestly I still kinda do, but I’ve gotten back into it a little bit in the last couple of years, and the reason is that I was introduced to the idea that Ishibashi might have been one of the best composers of all time. And it’s true, he might’ve been! His music combines cool and striking chords and tonalities with that Good Zone of sound design mixing spacey synthetic sounds and EDM/IDM percussion with more organic fantasy RPG-ish instruments and some occasionally strange rhythmic phrasing and polymeter.
Trois dawn of blur (translated perhaps a bit more naturally like Trois at Dawn, Blurred) is a story album self-described as having the major theme of “searching for the unknown,” with subthemes of “what is ‘beauty’?” and “the strength of a child.” The tracks, described with imagery on the album’s site, depict a young, injured robot girl exploring a world of natural beauty where magic and science once coexisted in harmony, a world that Ishibashi’s style of organic & synthetic fusion and often mysterious or mystical air often evokes to me anyway even without the backstory. It’s really great! Most of the tracks are pretty calm, what they would call “healing music” in the Japans, but the album also gets more poppy and dips into full electronica at times. It’s a pretty good sampling of the kind of things Ishibashi used to do.
Recommended tracks:
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“Technological” (track 1) starts the album off with the most electronica track on the album, building up some pretty, polymetric rhythmic figures before dropping the Beats at 2:18
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“The Far Side of the Moon Was Bitten” (track 5) presents a nice, classical-feeling theme and then proceeds to destroy it through audio design and harmony, in order to say “you shouldn’t be here”
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“The Beast Running Through the Wind” (track 8) is the main theme of the album and a self-contained journey of its own
(track titles are unofficial translations by me)
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