Note

Around 2015, I had the opportunity to compose the soundtrack for the independent short film “Cherenkov LIGHT”, directed by Akihiro Arashima, who is an active projectionist as well as a writer and film director. The film is a 14-minute “essence short movie” based on part of Arashima’s full-length novel “Cherenkov LIGHT”, which he had been writing since the early 2000s. The music created for the film was used only within the movie and remained unreleased for many years. It was finally released as a soundtrack album in the spring of 2022, timed with the publication of Arashima’s self-published full-length novel “Cherenkov LIGHT”.

As I remember, Mr. Arashima first asked me about composing music for the film shortly after the release of “Film Fetish” (2013). In the mid-2000s we worked together at a theater in Tokyo, and I had given him some of my recordings at the time. “Film Fetish” was built mainly around the track “Night Flight” from my early release “Voice Called From Within The Wall” (2004), along with several other pieces. For “Cherenkov LIGHT”, however, a different approach was taken: the music was arranged for each scene based on a central theme phrase, which appears as the harpsichord ending theme of the film.

The soundtrack accompanies a 14-minute short film that captures the essence of a roughly 500-page story. Besides the theme, the score includes ambient pieces for specific scenes and experimental sounds, with subtle use of Max/MSP, which I often used at the time. Because of its overall scale and nature, the music was not originally released as an album. With the publication of the novel, however, the material was expanded and revised for this release.

For the soundtrack release, a newly recorded acoustic guitar version of the theme from 2022 was added. It also includes a large number of demos and alternate versions created between 2013 and 2015 before receiving approval from director Akihiro Arashima, resulting in a total of 48 tracks with a running time of about 56 minutes. The lo-fi and experimental elements—along with the process of searching for the final theme from around 30 demos in 13 variations—form another distinctive aspect of this work. Influenced by many films and soundtracks, the album can be seen as an expression of the core of otom’s music.