One of the complaints about modern film scoring is how it can veer into sound design, with the two sometimes becoming indistinguishable. It’s a far cry from the theme based, Romantic, Wagnerian roots of film scoring and the traditional scoring-as-narrative approach. But it also gives room for experimentation in audio – sounds, approaches, techniques, etc. – and the broader question of “what is the purpose of film music?” As you can tell, I could carry on with this line of thought for a while, and one day maybe will, in a streaming vomit of thoughts, abstracts, rhetorical questions, and who knows what else, coming not even to an answer but maybe not even a cohesion. But there is a point here. Dowser √964’s/Hiroyuki Nagashima’s score for the cult cyber/techno horror film √964 Pinocchio is an earlier example of score-as-sound design, with the purpose of punishing the viewer in the same way as the titular 964 Pinocchio.
The film follows 964 Pinocchio, a sex robot who’s been discarded for failing to adequately perform. Wandering the streets of Tokyo, his memories wiped, he’s befriended by Himiko, a homeless woman who’s also without memory. Their friendship lasts until 964 Pinocchio undergoes a painful transformation, his memories returning and with them endless pain (reminiscent in some ways to the endless pain Godzilla feels in Shin Godzilla). To add to this pain, Himiko betrays him and the corporation that made him and rents him out begins to hunt him.
Throughout the film we see the pain 964 Pinocchio feels: anguish at being lost and alone in the world; chronic physical torment from his transformation; mental and physical abuse at the hands of his once-friend; the fear of your masters hunting you. There’s a sequence late in the film where, for several minutes straight, he is simply running and screaming.
The score, by Dowser √964 (usually credited to Hiroyuki Nagashima, but his band Dowser, here referring to themselves as Dowser √964, actually made the score) embodies this constant pain. Their music tends to be drawn out droning and ambient cues that gradually become increasingly torturous. Take an early sequence, where Himiko is looking for 964 Pinocchio through the underground malls of Tokyo. While she frantically searches, the endless din of crowd noise merges with a rather gentle repetitive ambient motif, the juxtaposition between her fear and anxiety – an outsider lost amidst the throngs of society that’s ostracized her – and the ordinary, day-to-day of the crowds themselves. Its pleasantness becomes unnerving.
Dowser’s score becomes ever harsher, trading in gentle drones for grating, industrial noises, blurring the line of what “music” can even be. Its harshness mirroring the screams of 964 Pinocchio, the uncaring industrial world that he inhabits, and the cruel corporatism that seeks to end him. There is no melody, no beauty, only suffering.
In a sense there is a narrative thrust to the score – the music becomes more torturous as the hellishness of 964 Pinocchio’s life increases, but that results from following his character rather than any ups or downs of the plot itself. No, instead we hear noises and drones that merge with his pain and suffering, amplifying it and thrusting it back into the eyes and ears of the viewer – if Pinocchio must suffer, so must they. And this effect is heightened in the score release – one of the most difficult albums I’ve ever heard, a punishment or penance for our own contribution to his suffering as participants in the industrial, corporatist world that birthed him.
There is an old adage that great film music works both to picture and as a standalone listen, and it’s understandable to want this to be true, that if something is great it transcends the medium for which it was created. But it isn’t. Dowser’s score for 964 Pinocchio is a powerful counterpart to the film that is almost unlistenable as a standalone score. Yet, its unlistenability is due in large part because it adheres to the themes of the film itself – an unknown force building within you, so great that eventually you must succumb to it and be destroyed (or destroy) in a fit of unassailable madness. How could this music possibly be an easy listen?