Anime info: Sprigganpedia
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
Kuniaki Haishima has worked on several other games, but I don’t really feel like listening to any of them at the moment for various reasons like rippability (NIGHT HEAD -THE LABYRINTH-) or interestingness (Doko Demo Issyo: Toro to Nagareboshi) or I’m kind of waiting to play an in-progress translation first (Kowloon’s Gate), so let’s switch to something he’s more famous for than game soundtracks: anime soundtracks. This is the first adaptation of the sci-fi action manga Spriggan, which is about governments and corporations fighting for control over ancient artifacts of power or something like that; this is a feature film and not an episodic series like the later one that came out a few years ago on Netflix.
While there’s still a little bit here and there, this soundtrack is the least ambient sound design-y of the four Haishima works I’ve listened to so far; this one is mostly orchestra, and when there are electronics mixed in they tend to be more aggressive or EDM-y, like in Metroid: Other M’s boss themes. The orchestral writing and vox do still hit the same horror vibes we’ve been seeing, more on the cacophonous and angry side than unsettling haunted house music this time around, though there are some slower, more emotional tracks too. There’s a little bit of incorporation of instrumentation from different countries, notably a Chinese vocalist performing the theme song “Jing Ling” and some Arabic instruments which I assume are appropriate for the setting given two track titles mention locations in Turkey. One of those tracks, “Ararat,” is also pretty worldbeat, which I’m mentioning as an example of how a couple of tracks get into more synthy electronic music territory. It’s still primarily an orchestral soundtrack, but there’s variance.
What’s the writing like? Chaotic and unhinged, just the way I like it. Sometimes there’s minimalist repeating figures with funky editing and effects on the orchestra that makes it sound like Drakengard, sometimes there’s a bunch of disparate random nonsense proggily thrown together into one track (film scoring!), sometimes the track collapses into electronic disaster, sometimes there’s just a weird rhythmic or tonal moment. In some ways it feels maybe a little less unrefined in composition and production than his later works that I listened to first, but it’s still got a ton of that experimental spark and I really appreciate how brash it is. Cool!
Recommended tracks:
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“Jing Ling” (vo. Säju, background vo. Nitza & Dennis Gunn) does a lot of randomly different ’90s stuff, but my favorite part is in the intro at 0:23 when the glitched vox turn into a distorted siren that just instantly cuts off at 0:36
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“Macdougal” is one of the couple of ambient sound design tracks that do still exist in this soundtrack
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“Galset Maar” has a lot of bendy chorus yelling
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“Amusing jean” is actually fairly aggressive and not amusing in a comical way at all
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“Snow field” is the most Drakengard of the Drakengards
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“SPRIEND” is a mostly normal and triumphant orchestral epilogue, it gets a little bumpy rhythmically at 0:55 with an extra transition beat or two in a couple of places and a midphrase time signature switch to 3/4
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