Watch Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, and you’ll see the countryside that Eiko Ishibashi and her partner Jim O’Rourke call home: the snow-capped extinct volcanoes, the dense forests and grassy meadows, frozen lakes and icy mountain streams. Yet it’s not by chance that the setting of Evil Does Not Exist matches the area west of Tokyo where the composer lives – in fact, the film is deeply interlinked with Ishibashi’s work and life, the visuals and the music both serving as inspirations to each other.
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After Hamaguchi heard Ishibashi’s 2018 LP The Dream My Bones Dream, the pair began working together on 2021’s Drive My Car. It picked up an Oscar for Best International Feature Film, and Ishibashi’s jazzy, verdant soundtrack – at once accessible and experimental – was a big part of its success. When she then asked Hamaguchi to create visuals she could perform to onstage, he came to the area where she and O’Rourke live and began to film, initially inspired by a handful of electronic instrumentals she had created. The director enjoyed what he’d filmed so much, though, that he turned it into a full film, with dialogue and storyline, and requested more musical material that Ishibashi then wrote to the finished edit.
The final version of Evil Does Not Exist isn’t exactly full of Ishibashi’s music – you’ll need to search out Ishibashi’s live shows featuring the shorter, silent version, entitled Gift, for that – but when it does appear it’s the most bewitching, powerful element of the film. The more electronic pieces are those that Ishibashi wrote first, inspirations for Hamaguchi’s visuals and story: “Hana V.2”, for instance, is all gently pulsing electronic tones that slowly form shifting chords, like shapes glimpsed in clouds. Vaporous strings and the kind of harsh cymbal drones heard in Neu!’s “Sonderangebot” briefly appear, alongside the sounds of the film’s troubled protagonist Takumi chopping wood.
“Smoke” and “Fether” are perhaps the most familiar pieces here, faintly reminiscent of the Drive My Car soundtrack or Ishibashi’s 2022 release For McCoy, and also to O’Rourke’s masterful music for Kyle Armstrong’s Hands That Bind. The former is driven by fluttering drums and Ishibashi’s layered flute, once again demonstrating her love for the measured, quicksilver jazz found on the ECM label, while the latter briefly mixes granulated textures with leaf-falls of piano. The longest piece here is the most ambient, the 12-minute “Missing V.2”, which begins with what seems like a Japanese train announcement; the film, however, reveals this to be a chilling public information message about a young girl lost in the forest as night begins to fall. Low strings hum and ominous piano chords toll, as important as the abstract electronics; gradually, clattering cymbals and a warped, synthetic heartbeat raise the tension, almost unbearably. The effect is stunning and enveloping.
The remaining three tracks are the most striking, both in the film and on the album. These were composed for the completed film, and find Ishibashi writing for strings (in fact overdubbed by two performers to simulate a lush orchestral ensemble). Her albums have included strings for years, but not like this: here, huge suspended chords hang like rock buttresses, showing Ishibashi’s childhood love of Bach and her more recent appreciation of modernist pioneer Charles Ives. At times, though, the harmonies seem to stall and, as if caught in the gravity of some unseen body, they spin off into eerie discord, before finally returning to the theme. It’s a stunning trick, and the power is all in the flow: these pieces snake as organically as the streams in Evil Does Not Exist, or twist like the antlers of the stag that plays such a mysterious, pivotal part in the film.
Quite how these pieces will exist as a live soundtrack to Gift will be revealed, but as a standalone soundtrack Evil Does Not Exist is a fine addition to Ishibashi’s singular work – the mood is darker and eerier than her feted Drive My Car, but it’s the stronger album nonetheless. What’s more, this astonishing record perfectly lays the groundwork for the song-based follow-up to The Dream My Bones Dream, due to float out of those deep forests in the tantalisingly near future.
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