Shoji Yamashiro

Yamashiro is the performing name used by Tsutomu Ohashi, founder of the Geinoh Yamashirogumi collective — a large, communal ensemble of amateur and semi-professional musicians he assembled over years around a shared interest in traditional Japanese, Indonesian and other folk musical traditions rather than conventional film scoring.

As leader of the collective, his gamelan-and-choir score for Akira — recorded before animation on the film even began — sounds like nothing else in cinema. The collective was not a conventional film-scoring outfit but this large communal ensemble blending Indonesian gamelan, Noh theater vocals and Buddhist chant, assembled specifically for the project rather than hired as an existing act.

Because the music was finished first, animators in several key sequences timed the visuals to match the pre-recorded score rather than the more usual reverse process of scoring to finished picture — an unusual and demanding workflow that gave the film's most memorable set pieces their distinctive, ritualistic rhythm.