Anyone who’s fallen in love with the look, feel and sound of Hayao Miyazaki’s and Studio Ghibli’s iconic animated films like My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle will fall in love with this new track, and the full-length mixtape to follow.
The project is being put together by an artist named Ghosting, which is actually the Melbourne-based production wizard Andrei Eremin, who has produced and mastered for some of the biggest names in the local scene, including Chet Faker, Hiatus Kaiyote and Ta-Ku.
Having sat down to watch the Hayao Miyazaki classic Spirited Away, Eremin was compelled to take the gorgeous, minimalist soundtrack and rework it with a dash of synth and boom-bap. It kicked off an obsession with the Miyazaki/Ghibli soundtracks, and the project is being spun out into an entire mixtape titled Reimagining Hayao Miyazaki.
“The mixtape started as a lightbulb moment to sample Spirited Away, one of my all-time favourite films,” Eremin told Konbini.
“I took out my keyboard on a whim, cut up the intro to the film and within 4 hours I’d finished the best track I’d ever made. From there the decision made itself – I had to sample every other Miyazaki film.”
Eremin explains that he’s found a new appreciation for the composer of Miyazaki’s soundtracks, Joe Hisashi, having now dissected his work and placed it under a microscope.
“His earliest soundtracks were the most challenging, with busy, chaotic instrumentation filled with key changes,” he tells Konbini. “Later films, however, welcomed minimalism: simple piano motifs became the focus and space between the notes told the story.”
Reimagining Hayao Miyazaki will be released in its entirety through Melbourne label Wondercore Island later this year, but for now we’ll just throw this beautiful number on repeat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxKjUkcUR2U
