The Fredösphere

I'm enjoying the title song from Ghost In the Shell: Innocence, featuring traditional Min'yo singers in Western-style triadic harmony:



Note the use of Autotune or other pitch manipulation. This, my friends, is how Autotune should be used. The weird, straight tones of the singers works with the pitch-bending for a completely novel effect. Novel, and beautiful, in my opinion. In fact, the effect mirrors in a more precise way the trills of the traditional music. Ancient becomes futuristic.

In the movie, a "ghost" refers to a person's consciousness, which can be transferred between bodies and computers. (I hope that's a fair description.) An odd choice in the visual design puts the human figures in pastels, upon a background of saturated colors. I think it means: we're all ghosts.

The soundtrack composer is Kenji Kawai. According to the movie's Wikipedia page:

The characteristic minyoh singers chorus, heard in the Chants of the first movie, and in the Ballade of Puppets in this one, was expanded to include 75 performers, which proved challenging to record. The session lasted for 14 straight hours.

As a bonus, here's a min'yo band (a min'yo com'bo???) singing their traditional music:

Labels: Composer, movie, Spooky, VideoClip