about the record

August in the Water: Music for Film 1995–2005 plots a decade of Hiroyuki Onogawa’s compositions for films by the renowned filmmaker Gakuryū Ishii, formally known as Sogo Ishii.

This retrospective publication, sequenced into an album by Onogawa himself, spans a fertile period of collaboration with Ishii, through soundtracks for three remarkable films: August in the Water 1995, Labyrinth of Dreams 1997, and Mirrored Mind 2005. Each feels texturally and sensually linked with the spiritual, ambient, dreamlike quality that lingers in Onogawa’s music.

The sound Onogawa conjures for these films is elegant and patient, often minimal or essential in form, but saturated in a poetic emotion and atmosphere that feels strange and otherworldly, touched by the metaphysical in subtle ways. Boundaries are crossed between New Age and science fiction, locating blissfulness, melancholy, and paranoia within the same spectrum, and moving toward an enchanting sense of mood and color. It’s notable that the compositions on this album straddle the millennium, and the mix of divine and uncertain themes in the music carries that currency. New listeners might hear links to Mark Snow’s compositional work for The X-Files and Millennium, or other celebrated future-facing and future-fearing Japanese anime or cyberpunk.

Onogawa’s music adds great depth and tenor to the sensory experience of the films themselves, but it stands just as strongly as a listening experience on its own terms, a virtuosic example of ambient that changes in hue when turned in the light.