107: Joe Hisaishi

I've been doing a lot of hard thinking work for my day job for the last few weeks. This has an effect on the things I listen to when I need to tune out distractions and get the job done. I can't listen to anything with lyrics when I need to reason or write, so I've been putting my writing playlist through its paces. It's mostly movie scores and a few video game scores, with a handful of instrumental pieces scattered throughout. Back when I was more precious about it, I organized the playlist into a kind of flow, rearranging the songs to fit my writing rhythm, but now whenever I find music that fits the mood I add new songs en masse. Then when I need to focus, I just open up the playlist and slap the shuffle button.

One of my favorite artists on the playlist is Joe Hisaishi, a prolific Japanese composer best known in the U.S. for his collaborations with Hayao Miyazaki. When I think of his work, I think of the lush quality of the strings, the sweeping grandeur of the massive trees at the beginning of Princess Mononoke and the mournfully grand tone of the main theme he wrote for the movie. His songs are usually lively and playful, or else thoughtful, as in my favorite song from Spirited Away, "The Sixth Station," which has strings and piano in measured conversation with each other over a stretch of the movie that's mostly silent montage of a train journey through a watery land.

I'm mostly familiar with Hisaishi's collaborations with Miyazaki, so I can't speak to the whole of his body of work. But to my somewhat limited ear, I think Hisaishi and Miyazaki together reached a peak with last year's The Boy and the Heron. It's a stunning capstone to Miyazaki's career (unless he comes out of retirement once again, as he's been doing for the last twenty-odd years). It's also one of my favorite film scores ever. Hisaishi braids his playful tendencies into a theme that sounds surprising and sinister, all without giving up the sense of grandeur that pervades his work. Many of the songs are brief and delicate, sharp spikes of violin and cello trading notes with a more steady piano theme before an insistent flute joins in and makes all the instruments hold hands in time. If you've never seen the movie, you should seek it out; it's currently available to buy on disc, and it's playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center here in Chicago in late June. If neither of those are options available to you, at the very least listen to the score. It's a good companion for warm afternoons in early summer.

What I wrote about:

For Seeing & Believing, I covered Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. It's a really solid action blockbuster–on a technical level, the filmmaking is stunning–but I'm still chewing on a few things that didn't quite work for me.

What I'm listening to:

The cicadas that started emerging last week have finally hit the treetops. There are so many of them in our neighborhood that there's a constant high-pitched hum in the distance behind the individual close-up rasps of nearby cicadas. If you've never heard a 17-year swarm, it's like a more organic version of white noise or highway traffic, constantly whirring in the background, just a little too loud and too novel to tune out. It reminds me very much of the grinding background gears in Mountain Goats lo-fi songs, which were recorded on a Panasonic boom box; the boom box condenser microphone sits so close to the gears turning the cassette tape that they always pick up a fuzzy background hum behind the music. I've been listening to The Coroner's Gambit this past week; of all the many things I want to try this summer, it's getting more into lo-fi music. If you have a favorite album (Mountain Goats or not), let me know! I want to listen to it.