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Various Artists

TV, Anime & Manga New Age Soundtracks 1984-1993

When Japanese composer Yas-Kaz left Tokyo for Bali in the mid 1970s he had little idea of how influential his trip would become. In studying the storied art of gamelan, the jazz and avant-garde percussionist opened a door to a world of sound and rhythm left behind by the West.

The music he and his contemporaries made would become known as new age. It also happened to soundtrack the golden era of anime.

Awash with money and with the prerogative to entertain the burgeoning middle classes, anime in the 1980s experienced a creative and commercial boom. Not constricted by generic expectations, production houses such as the now renowned Studio Ghibli were able to experiment liberally with both form and content. And with it came the space for composers to be similarly adventurous.

TV, Anime & Manga New Age Soundtracks 1984-1993 charts this moment across eight tracks spanning classics of the genre and previously unknown rarities. The collection brings together music that found kinship in electronic and acoustic instrumentation, often combining spiritual or environmental themes with percussive, varied and highly refined syncopations of non-Western musical traditions.

Among them is Kaneda by Geinoh Yamashirogumi, the shape-shifting group of self-styled musicians, anthropologists and computer scientists that masterminded the soundtrack to game-changing dystopian anime Akira - and with whom the sound, tuning and breakneck speed of Balinese gamelan has become indelibly entwined.

Reflecting the desires of the era to reach beyond Japans borders, many of the soundtracks featured were commissioned for narratives set in distant lands or alternative worlds. Theres violinist and composer Norihiro Tsurus Farsighted Person, written for The Heroic Legend of Arsl?n, set in ancient Persia; Yas-Kazs own Hei (Theme of Shikioni), for period sci-fi manga & anime series Peacock King - Spirit Warrior; and two tracks - Tassili NAjjer and Fiesta Del Fuego - from Yoichiro Yoshikawas soundtrack to NHKs proto-Planet Earth series The Miracle Planet.

Such was the variety and quality of the music produced, if there is a guiding principle to the tracks collected here it is a sense of escapism and adventure that came with the confluence of modern electronic instruments and a fascination with percussive traditions.

Elsewhere, pioneering childrens TV composer Chumei Watanabes Fushigi Song (performed by a vocal group Korogi 72) offers a trippy and infectious groove with sonic similarities to Don Cherrys Brown Rice; little-known jazz-funk library group Columbia Orchestra showcase the best of Tokyos session musicians on Hearts Beats - Theme for Andrew Glasgow; before lawyer-turned-composer Kan Ogasawara closes out the compilation with a dramatic flourish on Gishin Anki.

Following on from Time Capsules acclaimed deep-dive into the world of manga & anime synth-pop in 2022, this vinyl only collection is set to broaden and diversify an understanding of how soundtracks shaped the sound of new age music in Japan for a generation.