- Eiko Ishibashi's soundtrack for one of this year's most talked-about films is an unforgettable as the movie.
- The first sound in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Oscar-nominated film Drive My Car is the mere suggestion of strings, like an echo divorced of its source material. The melody it plays out is vaguely sad, but more than anything, it's ambiguous—tentative, perplexed. This is the music of Eiko Ishibashi, a Japanese composer and sound artist whose work is largely (electro)acoustic but approaches mixing and the soundstage like an electronic music producer would. Her score for Drive My Car is one the film's most arresting aspects. Its twin themes seem to breathe and exhale along with the wrenching, slow-moving plot, morphing to suit new moods and new characters as they appear. It's a great film soundtrack, and it also makes for an unusually good album, as Ishibashi's beautifully recorded compositions come together in new configurations each time.
The film, in as brief terms as possible, follows a bereaved Japanese playwright who takes a residency in Hiroshima, following his intense and often frustrating personal relationships. I'm not here to discuss or spoil the film for you, but it helps to understand the soundtracks motivation, whose emotional ambiguity is one of Ishibashi's greatest strengths. Drive My Car's main theme is based on piano, drums and strings (performed by a band that includes Jim O'Rourke). It lays out all basic ingredients for Ishibashi's score, including an electric piano whose tremolo effect is the aural equivalent of watering eyes, strings that swoop in for a hint of feeling without a trace of sentimentality.
She can write melodies that wrench with feeling, but exactly what feeling that might be is left to the listener to decide. For those who have seen the film, the character-specific themes are wonderful: the hired driver Misaki's version mirrors the smooth, professional clip of her driving, while the main character Kafuku's theme is a tortured inversion of the original, with a sense of distant but intense yearning. Ishibashi's arpeggiated piano figures are incredible here—stately yet stuck in a circular rut.
The drums, jazzy and pacy, also command your attention. They imitate the film's curious dramatization of commuting—the regularity of driving to and from work, following the speck of a car moving along a beautiful landscape. Ishibashi says she based all her music for the film around one rhythm, and the soundtrack comes back to it again and again, sometimes slow and wounded, other times brisk.
The other main theme is the one you hear at the beginning of the film—"We'll Live Through The Long, Long Days, And Through The Long Nights." More focused on strings, this one features fantastic interplay between piano and bass, though each successive version feels a little more skeletal, almost like the decay of a Caretaker album. This composition has the most variation, from the windswept Spaghetti Western twang of "And When Our Last Hour Comes We'll Go Quietly" to the sprightly, almost hopeful closing track "Different Ways."
Along with the exquisitely recorded instruments, the compositions are fortified with field recordings, some presumably made by Ishibashi herself and others featuring sounds from the film added by the producers. You can hear the click of a cassette deck, the ambiance of traffic, the beeping of a car's door ajar alarm, all of which suffuse the music with a warm, familiar air. The most arresting moments happen in tracks like "Saab 900" and "Hiroshima," including jarring car horn streaking across the stereo spectrum as if narrowly avoiding accident. These touches are so lifelike that they makes you feel like you're in that reliable old Saab yourself, mulling over the meaning of life and purpose along with the characters.
In that same interview with Tone Madison, Ishibashi said, "I don't consider the Drive My Car soundtrack to be my own work." That's something of a harsh assessment—and I don't agree—but it also underlines her own commitment to the film, and the music's almost alchemical quality. Listening to the soundtrack on its own is to experience Ishibashi's electroacoustic magic, but listening to it in the film it becomes part of the fabric of the visuals, as important as dialogue or any establishing shot. This is the true genius of Ishibashi's score, which just happens to work well as an album, too. Like the film it soundtracks, Drive My Car explores the deepest, most complex and often subtle shades of human emotion, presenting similar scenes and themes with just small tweaks, or new, heavier feeling each time.
Tracklist01. Drive My Car
02. Drive My Car (Misaki)
03. Drive My Car (Cassette)
04. Drive My Car (the important thing is to work)
05. "We'll live through the long, long days, and through the long nights"
06. "We'll live through the long, long days, and through the long nights" (SAAB 900)
07. "We'll live through the long, long days, and through the long nights" (Oto)
08. Drive My Car (Kafuku)
09. Drive My Car (The truth, no matter what it is, isn't that frightening)
10. "We'll live through the long, long days, and through the long nights" (And when our last hour comes we'll go quietly)
11. Drive My Car (Hiroshima)
12. "We'll live through the long, long days, and through the long nights" (different ways)