Soundtrack Samurai

A little quickie one this time, just because I have some thoughts to get down about this. I just saw this trailer pop up on my Twitter and there are more than a few things that caught my attention. The first being at 33 seconds in...



I'm very, very excited to see FlyLo's approach to a soundtrack, from the brief bits heard in this teaser it sounds like he isn't straying too far from his usual sound, but he does occasionally do some beautiful ambient style pieces too so here's hoping there's some of that too.

FlyLo is no stranger to appearing on soundtracks at this point - he's even appeared in an Anime series before with Shinichirō Watanabe's Carole & Tuesday, among other western artists. It's almost coming full circle for FlyLo too, his early work that you can find on the 'net from the mid 2000's was all geared towards that very specific kind of hip hop beat that would appear on Adult Swim commercial 'bumps' - Adult Swim and Toonami being one of the easier places to watch Anime in the 2000's.

Hip Hop and Samurais is a tried and tested formula too, if you've ever seen Samurai Champloo (Also by Shinichirō Watanabe!) you'll know that it's a combo that can work amazingly well, no doubt FlyLo is already very acquainted with that soundtrack too. I do like it when things get shaken up like that - technically anachronistic though it may be, the OST for Champloo is one of the major highlights about it. I've said before how I love when a soundtrack strays from your traditional 'cinematic' score, and I can only hope that this inspires more to try something like that out.

Netflix original memes aside, I'm tentatively excited for it - it looks fairly decent and the soundtrack is obviously a big draw too - maybe off the back of this we'll see more artists collaborate in a similar way, there are plenty of series out there that I think a lot of artists could do interesting things with. Arguments about quality of the series themselves aside, the Netflix original Anime series have been good for that, their addition to the Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex series had similarly good soundtrack choices - perhaps not as iconic as Yoko Kanno's work but still befitting of the GITS universe.

That'll do it for this one, apologies for it being a little thin on the ground with actual music content. With any luck they'll put out an OST teaser or something soon too so I can report back with that. But until then: as always, stay safe and enjoy the music.

-CVF