4 out of 5

Label: Murffin Discs

Produced by: Chu Ishikawa, Shinichi Kawahara

A dense, haunting score by Chu Ishikawa and Shinichi Kawahara, with both contributors adding much to atmosphere, though not quite always melding their two styles.

The opening theme, from Ishikawa – Insight II – is nice and direct, presenting the half-industrial / half-ambient vibe pretty effectively, if set to something that fits into a bit more of a “song” structure, with a Silent Hill-esque haunting tune playing raw and pretty elements against one another; we get just a blurb to start, and the whole thing at the end – a good way to not spoil the fact that most tracks are longer and more oblique.

Kawahara’s Asian dinner is an equally good followup that establishes their stepping stone from Chu’s moodier contributions to lighter fare, with occasional glimmers of doom. Kawahara’s works mostly stay in this realm, and aren’t necessarily as dense as Chu’s work, but narratively make sense for a film. On album, that’s not always the case: when we get the next batches of Shinichi’s efforts, running the tunes together firstly makes them a bit less notable, and the longer the sections stretch on, the further from the more immersive atmosphere of Chu’s stuff we get. This isn’t to say that they’re bad – sticking with the Silent Hill vibe (which is very present), these tracks do feel like the “memories” one might get in those games, when things are shiny and good, it’s just they work best as juxtaposition as opposed to carrying whole sections of the score.

Ishikawa’s work is the bulk of this, though, and it’s quite a ride, going way more cryptic and genre-blendy than I feel we’d get from even the best American horror movie score-ers, and maintaining a level of musicality that keeps one engaged – it never fully tipples over into ambient, which I think is the temptation with some soundtracks of this genre. Similarly, it is completely bereft of the (as I’d see them) lazy jump scares of some scores – the sudden strings; “random” percussion clatter – and instead relies on building tension through patient and effective melodies, told via digital and organic-sounding mashups, a satisfyingly discomforting dichotomy.