I’ve got a number of bands that I consider my favourite and almost essential listening for me personally, but even still there will be periods where I take a break from a band or delete them from my iPod to make room for other stuff. But regardless of my listening habits this album has always, and probably will always have a spot saved for it.

I find it hard to sleep at night without some kind of noise to lose my mind to, otherwise I can’t seem to switch my brain off and before I know it 3 hours have passed and I’ve just been thinking about Photoshop or the D&D campaign setting I’m working on (I’ve not forgotten Sam). Normally I’ll stick a podcast on (I reccomend SModcast, Ricky Gervais or Mega64) just to have some kind of voice talk me away, and I can’t really listen to music because it gets me too riled up and I start drumming. However this is the exception. Whilst being obviously very slow-paced and reminiscent of some kind of <sweeping generalisation>Asian ritual</sweeping generalisation>, I find it incredibly evocative of the unhurried worlds painted in Mamoru Oshii’s films, notably the Patlabor series and of course Ghost In The Shell.

The original GITS manga while saturated with fictional technology (a trait of Shirow’s work, often to its detriment - see Orion) to such a degree that you must almost wade through a sea of details on weapons specifications and cybernetics, and as serious in its story as any cyberpunk manga comes, is comparatively lighthearted when put next to the film. There’s jokes everywhere from offhand comments, to little super-deformed moments, to the infamous Fuchikoma “Think Tanks”, who behave in a similar manner to their Tachikoma counterparts from the anime series. They themselves are the very epitomy of “lightheartedness”.

To breifly go into Patlabor: there’s a bunch of anime series and stuff, all of which have the same feel. To call these lighthearted is to call Hitler a “bad guy.” It kinda goes without saying really. I remember one episode of the anime in particular where the entire cast gets sick and it transpires that their takeout delivery guy got lost and all of their food bowls were licked by dogs. Yeah.

But Oshii seems to have a gift for turning any source material into something very much “his.” The Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell and Jin-Roh films all have a very similar atmosphere, with the slow, relaxed pacing making them seem more like montages of foreign worlds, but the good kind of montage, like the one at the start of Watchmen. The whole experience feels like you’re observing a city you’ve never been to, in winter. To compare them to other works I’d look to the second half of the Cowboy Bebop series and the film, Tezuka’s Metropolis (the film) and Dororo (the manga, the live-action film stinks and I haven’t seen the series), and especially the short (like only 20 minutes) OVA, Twilight Q (the second half/story with the fish, which is also one of my most favourite animated things).

EDIT: I just found that that the second half of Twilight Q was indeed directed by Oshii. Bonus!

To return to whatever point I drifted from, this whole album evokes the same feeling I got when watching all of those works (and not just because it was specifically written for one of then). The composer, Kenji Kawai has perfectly nailed this feeling of “absent-minded wander” through a Hong Kong or Neo-Tokyo that only seems to exist in anime like this or parts of Akira.

My favourite part of the whole album is the last track, the final build from something that previously was comfortably, yet with a distant look in its eyes, ambling along. There are three “chants” including this track (the first) spread across the album, that give a feeling of subtle continuity without milking the idea and it’s the last one that closes the album and expands upon the musical ideas from the previous two. I love that it’s not a gradual build across all three tracks but rather this expansion is only introduced right at the end of the album thus making the place the music goes, dispite being a natural progression of previous ideas, still feel unfamiliar and foreign (it always reminds me of the small departure in the QOTSA track Better Living through Chemistry from Rated R). And then, as quick as it came, this climax is gone and the instrumentation reduces back to the simple drums of the first track, returning to how it started, instilling a cyclical feeling of “and so it continues, with no descernable start or end,” like some kind of fleeting 40-minute moment.

Sorry for going on, god knows those of you that know me personally must think I reference GITS far too much, but I enjoy writing about dope shit I like. Dope shit.