When you watch Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away for the first time, it’s easy to get lost in the movie’s breathtaking visuals and and sprawling plot. The movie’s music, though, is where you can really get a sense of the emotions that guide Chihiro as she journeys deeper into the spirit world.
Where Miyazaki’s visual style is often flamboyant and whimsical, Spirited Away composer Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack is at times shot through with somberness and loneliness. It’s in the fusion of those two drastically different approaches to the same story that Melbourne-based producer Andrei Eremin, a.k.a. Ghosting, found inspiration for his new project, the Reimagining Miyazaki mixtape.
“The mixtape started as a lightbulb moment to sample Spirited Away, one of my all-time favorite films,” Eremin explains on his Bandcamp page. “I took out my keyboard on a whim, cut up the intro to the film, and within four hours I’d finished the best track I’d ever made.”
Pulling tracks from the iconic Miyazaki film, Eremin turns the sound of the story (and by extension, the story itself) into something different, but deeply familiar. Eremin says that after his epiphanic experiment with Spirited Away, he’s planning on sampling every other Miyazaki movie that’s been released to date.
The full Reimagining Miyazaki mixtape will be available to download on May 12.
[H/T NPR]