What Eiko Ishibashi gains in translation
28.06.2024 - 17:53
/ thefader.com
We open on a long, steady tracking shot through the woods, the camera peering upward through a thin tree canopy into a bright winter sky. Gently swung cymbal triplets trickle up from the ground, followed by a pristine electric guitar from above, and symphonic strings that seep in through the sides and slowly saturate the mix.
We follow the wandering lens and the hypnotic strings until they cut off abruptly, leaving us suspended in midair for a moment before we fall, quickly but not painfully, to the forest’s frozen floor. The film is Evil Does Not Exist, renowned Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s second feature scored by Japanese composer Eiko Ishibashi.
Their first creative partnership, 2021’s Oscar-winning Drive My Car, was a relatively straightforward director-scorer affair, linked by a producer. But the working relationship that led to the new film was much more symbiotic.
Watching and listening to its opening sequence out of context, it would be impossible to discern whether the music was made for the film or vice versa. Read Next: New Music Friday: Stream albums from Mabe Fratti, Boldy James, Loma, and more In fact, the film’s orchestral theme is the only part of its score that Ishibashi composed after viewing its first cut.
It was recorded in her longtime partner Jim O’Rourke’s studio, which sits next to the house they share in the Japanese countryside. She recorded the rest of the music in her own studio (within the home itself), before looking at the script — some of it before Hamaguchi had even envisioned the footage he’d shot in her area as belonging to a full-length film.
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