Exhibition info: website
Listening: soundtrack album
Info
Here’s the first soundtrack for a live exhibition I’m posting; this is music that plays in various rooms throughout the building in Art Aquarium Museum GINZA, a museum featuring various mixed-media artistic displays of goldfish in colorfully-lit containers. The organization behind this has been putting on shows since 2007, originating as a series called “Sky Aquarium,” but they only got their own dedicated location in 2020 in Nihonbashi, a district in Tokyo. That location closed after only a year, and in 2022 they reopened in nearby Ginza, where they’re still operating today.
The composer of all the music that plays at the museum is Conisch, who mostly does anime soundtracks, notably Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, but he’s also done a decent amount of live action scores and some stage music. I’ve only heard one other set of music by him: his scores for the three Mardock Scramble animated films. These are some of the best anime soundtracks I’ve ever heard, mixing great dark electronic sound design with sinister, jazzy, quirky, and downright weird compositions, reminding me sometimes of Tomáš Dvořák’s work and the Thousand-Year Door soundtrack. The third movie also has the best version of “Amazing Grace” that’s ever existed for some reason?????
For the most part, the music here is fairly low-key, ambient, and contemplative, which matches the vibe of the exhibits as they’re previewed on the website, plus this is an art exhibition in a museum after all. The instrumentation varies from track to track, but on the acoustic side you’ll hear strings and winds, piano, vocals, and some shamisen and Japanese percussion, and the handful of electronic tracks feature synths and environmental sound effects. Compositionally this definitely doesn’t get as far out there as his Mardock Scramble scores, but there are some definite commonalities; there’s still a little bit of dark weirdness here and there, and some of the more normal tracks keep things interesting with good chords or minimalist composition. I liked it! Not mindblowing, but enjoyable to zone out to for a bit.
Recommended tracks:
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“Pantheonic Pastime” is one of the most ambient tracks overall, love the twinkling background synth that sounds like the room in the back of a video game temple where you get or place a mystical orb
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“Afterglow Spectrum” plays with rhythms, first with polymeter at 0:54 and then at 1:25 when it alternates irregularly between a four-beat figure and then that figure with two extra beats in the middle or end
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“Pleasure” is the gift shop theme (real) and the most overtly classic Japanese-sounding track, though my favorite parts are the low-key percussive soundscape moments like the intro
(track titles are unofficial translations by me)
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