Great Anime Composers: Kuroishi Hitomi & Kotaro Nakagawa

Kuroishi Hitomi is a dream-pop / neoclassical singer-songwriter and composer-orchestrator from Kanazawa, Japan. Her trademark is her own soft voice and use of ethereal choirs and a million references to Hollywood film scores. She is credited simply as Hitomi for her vocals. She formed her own music group “Dolce Triade” (the other members being performers). Hitomi has worked alongside Koutaro Nakagawa on a number of anime soundtracks, such as Planetes, Gun � Sword and Code Geass, but doing mostly just the insert songs. Kotaro Nakagawa is a composer, arranger and hardcore Trombone player. He scored plenty of Tokusatsu scores but he really unleashes all hell in the anime department.

His most famous (and best) work is Code Geass, a landmark in TV-Anime scoring, followed by a series of excellent quirky scores, all in a potpurri of styles and crazy fun. All in different flavors: Gun X Sword is western, Planetes is SciFi, Zettai Karen Children is Action Comedy, ACTIVERAID is mecha. Gosick is a special case where the score would be baller with a real symphony orchestra but is nonetheless perhaps his most mature effort. Prison School, likewise is one of his best, evoking Eric Serra’s Goldeneye and Elmer Bernstein’s Great Escape. He sure had a blast with the score (recorded in Hollywood!).

But while I immensely enjoy Nakagawa’s work, with just a handful of scores Hitomi has demonstrated far greater potential as a film composer that sadly never blossomed.

Sample (Barok/Classical) (http://picosong.com/wskbS/) / Sample (Hollywood) (http://picosong.com/wskQ4/) / Sample (very Oshima-esque) (http://picosong.com/wskQZ/) / Sample (Merge of all with class) (http://picosong.com/wskEc/)

She hasn’t really worked on anything notable outside of projects with Range as lead artist but ID-0 was composed by Hattori so even that no longer applies.

It’s lamentable but hopefully the next Code Geass projects have some composing duties beyond her role as vocalist.

Last Exile is the kind of project that examplifies the Japanese dilemma: The scores deserved the LSO but got a penny-pitching ensemble with half the instruments synth. But even then she managed to achieve, what is in my opinion, a real gem of the Late-Night anime niche.

Her scores have everything: From folk to barok, from John Williams “Somewhere in My Memory” to “Curse of the Black Pearl”. But Silvestri seems to be her primary inspiration above all. A composer with such obvious love for and knowledge of good music never really had a career in the 2000s, when anime music was at its peak, and that is a tragedy.

With Shangri-La she got the closest to a full orchestra and it’s a gem as well. Rarely do you see such good use of percussion and classy playfulness, even by TV anime standards and her vocals worked perhaps the best here.

LINK IN DESCRIPTION (https://mega.nz/#!hjhhjQyL!TkwNPqZOvEYkRQvPsnKvin-hpA9Wo_W65cHWPxkelfc)

Everything is of course in FLAC if possible. I should also mention that Hakkenden has a second season soundtrack but that one is pretty much all synth, except for a couple of strings. But even horrible samples can’t stop her:

Mummy Returns Demo Tape (http://picosong.com/wskr5)

And here’s a drinking game: Take a shot each time she references a Hollywood score. I tried it with Silver Wing and scotch and here’s the result:

Literally Anime Jack Sparrow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnyLP8LMI4o)

Enjoy