Kenji Kawai: Ghost in the Shell (soundtrack) [WRWTFWW]

Why you'll love it

This was the score's first official vinyl edition, cut from the original master reels at Emil Berliner Studios. The film went on to inspire The Matrix and is now counted among the greatest anime ever made.

This edition

• First official vinyl edition
• Cut from the original master reels

About the album

A wedding song in ancient Japanese, sung by a choir in Bulgarian folk harmony, is not the obvious way to score a cyberpunk thriller. Kenji Kawai did it anyway for Mamoru Oshii's film, and the result is one of the most recognizable sounds in anime. The film itself blended traditional cel animation with early CGI, and Kawai's music, with its vocals in classical Japanese, was praised by critics as warmly as the visuals.

The choir appears in three parts, "Making of Cyborg," "Ghost City" and "Reincarnation," framing the record, while the pieces in between drift through ambient electronics and tense, shadowy pulses, from "Puppetmaster" and "Nightstalker" to "Floating Museum" and "Ghostdive." The film follows Major Motoko Kusanagi through New Port City in 2029, and the score sounds like rain on neon.

The score was bootlegged for years before this proper vinyl edition arrived in 2017. It's ideal for late nights, and for pretending Queen Street is considerably more futuristic than it is.

Also at Kops: more Kenji Kawai on vinyl · browse Soundtracks

Tracklist

Listen

On WRWTFWW Records (cat# WRWTFWW017), a reissue of the 1995 soundtrack.