Yutaka Yamada: Sounding Nothingness and Living Death - The Wire

"The first season of Shinsuke Sato's live action science fiction series Alice In Borderland (2020, based on Haro Aso's manga serialised between 2010 and 2016) opens with a shooter game being played on a large bedroom screen by Arisu, a self-absorbed, unemployed rich kid. The game's audiovision is violent, meaningless, enthralling. Cut to Arisu and his slacker friends Kurabe and Chota meeting up at Tokyo's Shibuya station. Unexpectedly, Arisu becomes conscious of something just beyond his grasp. A slow track into his face actively fades down the sound of swarming people on their way to work. A few softly played piano notes are sounded: this is a premonition of the frailty of life, which Arisu and his friends may soon lose."

"After experiencing a power outage while in Shibuya station, the trio emerge onto an entirely emptied Scramble Crossing. Composer Yutaka Yamada unfurls low horn sustains and rumbling sheets of noise: something is seriously wrong here. They don't realise it yet, but they're in a 'borderland' between life and death, where they'll be forced to play an unending series of death games. Returning individually to their work places, each realises the breadth of erasure around them. Rising multiphonic tones musicalise the omnipresent air-con ringing audible in both interior and exterior environments."

"Interspersed with these chordal passages are the distant looping of electronic tones, as if an electrical home appliance has been left unattended, sounding a soft warning tone, the type of which was pioneered in Japanese consumer appliances in the late 20th century. A quick historical aside. Since the 1960s denki revolution of accelerated electronics design, music in Japan serviced industry in ways that would shape the psychoacoustic environment of the country for decades to come. Through the combination of piezoelectric actuators and 8-bit audio, beeps, tones and melodies became ubiquitous in products which sonically communi"

Alice In Borderland opens with Arisu immersed in a violent shooter game before he and his friends discover an emptied Shibuya. Sound design signals dislocation through faded crowd noise, soft piano premonitions and low horn sustains that suggest something is seriously wrong. The characters enter a borderland between life and death and are forced into relentless death games while environments register erasure. Multiphonic tones and looping electronic alerts evoke omnipresent air-conditioning and appliance warnings. A historical context links Japan's 1960s denki revolution, piezoelectric actuators and 8-bit audio to the ubiquity of consumer beeps and tones.

Read at The Wire Magazine - Adventures In Modern Music