If I may bend the rules of English for a moment, you can’t NOT pay attention to the Akira soundtrack.  It really grabs your attention and puts you into the surreal world that director Katsuhiro Otomo presents in the movie.  By the way, don’t listen to the Akira soundtrack if you’re looking for your next fave JPop song because it’s not here. 

    Scored by Shoji Yamashiro and performed by his group, Geinoh Yamashirogumi, Akira flaunts and exorbitant sense of music structure and composition—it’s as if the songs are penned via mathematical formula.  The Yamashirogumi is a musical group that promotes the fusion of traditional instruments with new technology, and the result on Akira is incredible.  Synthetic sounds blend with tribal drumming and chanting to form one of the best OST/movie combinations I’ve ever run across.

    Fortunately, there are copious liner notes accompanying the CD, detailing what instruments are used, how the track relates to the movie and what sort of mood Yamashiro was looking for.  This is good because it’s easy to get lost in some of the songs due to their lengths.  However, the notes aren’t always helpful, like when Yamashiro says in his notes for “Winds Over Neo-Tokyo,” “It starts off chromatically with tonal instability, but is actually constructed with pentatonic structure.” 

    There might be fifteen people who own the Akira OST and can understand that.  Thanks for the knowledge, though.

    It’s hard to take apart the soundtrack song-by-song because the whole is definitely greater than the sum of the parts.  On their own, the songs more than likely won’t make any sense to the listener, and may even be a bit boring.  However, when you hear the percussive theme from “Kaneda” show up in “Battle Against Clown,” not only is it really cool, but helps to illustrate the action on the screen (since Kaneda was indeed fighting it out with the Clown gang).

    Despite that, there are some standout tracks here, and they deserve a bit of singling out.

    The first is Tetsuo’s theme.  At over 10 minutes, it does a great job mirroring Tetsuo’s changing character during the course of the movie.  Beginning with some percussion via the gamelan (an Indonesian instrument), “Tetsuo” slowly evolves into a hugely complex number through the addition of chanting, more drum lines and synthesizer.  A chill quiet falls over the song just past the six-minute mark before reverting to the simple gamelan rhythm of the beginning that repeats to the end.

    I’ll be honest; “Dolls’ Polyphony” scares the hell out of me.  Yamashiro makes full use of stereo imaging, with the repeated words “piron” and “poron” seeming to come from every direction.  The base piron-ing fades out slightly to some more emphatic pirons, in advance of deep male chanting that takes over the song.  Put your headphones on, fall asleep with this on repeat and see what kind of crazy dreams you have.

    “Shohmyoh,” which is based on Buddhist chanting,  also gives me the tinglies, but in a good way this time.  As the song progresses, the chanting builds in fervor, with the occasional chime added for punctuation.  Synth percussion and guitar slowly begin to appear around the middle, just before a shift in mood around six minutes in.  The chanting changes from religious to ritualistic and again builds in passion.  The frenetic pace continues all the way to the end, before a heavy drum hit stops everything cold.

    With nearly 14:00 of music conforming to the structure used in the traditional Japanese theatre of “Noh,” “Illusion” is more or less a recreation of the Akira storyline as if it were a Noh play.  There’s a really cool old-school feel to the song, which is thrown off by a random angry chord at a couple different points.  “Illusion,” performed live in studio according to the liner notes, absolutely highlights the Yamashirogumi creed of traditional meeting high tech.  The last 30 seconds are pretty intense, as a growling synth is added to the Noh performance.

    Saving the best for last, “Requiem” does a fantastic job of recounting each of the preceding tracks, reliving them once again.  There’s a brief appearance of Kaneda’s theme, followed by some almost hymnal chanting (replete with Latin lyrics that say, “Tetsuo, rest in peace”) and a bit of pipe organ. At eight and half minutes, a sort of Buddhist mantra blends seamlessly with the hymnal chanting, before being joined by the percussion and vocals found so much in the first few songs.  It’s more than 14 and a half dark, brooding and oppressive minutes that still manages to be a soft and gentle ending to a disc full of musical wizardry.

Rating: A Head Trip Plus Postcards out of 10