Susumu Hirasawa is a Japanese musician with a very strange musical style.
Most simply, he’s an electronica musician. One uses a lot of different instruments and pieces of audio-visual equipment, including a fair number of lasers and things he’s constructed (and presumably conceptualised) himself.
This clip from his YouTube channel is actually one of the more understated performances I’ve seen him giveL
As an anime fan (ladies), I know him best for his pretty well-established anime connection. I suspect that broadly true for most people familiar with Hirasawa, but he has had a pretty successful career for decades even notwithstanding the iconic anime soundtracks his been involved with.
Incidentally, he’s also the namesake of Yui Hirasawa from K-On! – if you’re unfamiliar with the series, the exclamation point is part of the title, but the end of a sentence. He had a whole thing — that I’m 97% sure he deliberately exaggerated for humour — on Twitter when he learned about that.
To focus on that anime connection – and go on a bit of a digression before circling back to today’s playlist entry, though not his first anime soundtrack, Hirasawa made a major impression with his soundtrack for the iconic Dark Fantasy series Berserk – if you are unfamiliar with the series, it is absolutely neither safe for work nor the faint of heart.
Most notably, Hirasawa’s soundtrack for Berserk brought us Forces, likely one of the most beloved anime tracks of all time.
I, for one, have never heard electronic bagpipes go so hard.
More pertinently to today’s post, Hirasawa did the music for two movies (and a third unfinished projected) and an anime series from director Satoshi Kon. Stylistically, that’s a perfect match. Hirasawa makes weird music and Kon (who died of cancer at the age of 46 in 2010) made weird movies.
Even Tokyo Godfathers, likely Kon’s most grounded movie, isn’t exactly depicting a normal, mundane world.
Which brings us to Paprika. Kon’s final completed movie and based on the 1993 novel of the same name, Paprika could be compared to Inception – at least insofar as they’re both about going into people’s dreams to manipulate their subconscious minds to affect their behaviour and mindset.
But Paprika is weird, even compared to Inception.
There are two similar but separate songs that are relevant here. The same years as Paprika and its soundtrack, Hirasawa released the album Byakkoya – White Tiger Field, a reference to an oil field in Vietnam, itself a reference to the “White Tiger,” one of the four guardian gods presiding over the four directions in East Asian mythology.
There is a girl mentioned in the original version of the song (specifically wearing an Áo dài), which does seem to be about watching the actual oil field from afar. But the Girl in Byakkoya seems to be Paprika herself – fitting, since the song is basically used as her theme in the movie.
Briefly, Paprika is the digital avatar that the psychiatrist who is the real main character of the movie uses to enter her patients’ dreams to subtly nudge them towards self-improvement. And the lyrics, such as I am able to find and parse them, do seem to reflect that dream-guide aspect.
“I followed a girl who showed me the way,
Lyrics via musixmatch.
an incantation of the shimmering haze.
And high upon the hill appeared
the nameless field I’d yearned for.”
(There doesn’t seem to be an official English translation,
so the available translations vary wildly.)
The two versions are both musically and lyrically similar, though The Girl in Byakkoya features additional female vocals, provided by an early Vocaloid voice bank named Lola.
And, yeah. That tracks for a Susumu Hirasawa song…
For some reason, the Paprika soundtrack isn’t available on Spotify, but I have found a cover version of The Girl in Byakkoya for my playlist:
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