The artist who goes by johnny_ripper on SoundCloud refers to one of his latest tracks, “Cat Soup,”as a “love letter”to the Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa. Ripper goes on to explain, “95% of this song is music and sounds from the movie *Cat Soup*,” a decade-old Japanese anime that Yuasa created. The anime itself, an abstract and psychedlic journey into sublime weirdness (still image above), had little in the way of score (at least in its first third, which is shown streaming below), depending instead on much in the way of sound desgin elements like wind chimes (see screen shot below), insects, and other everyday noises — as well as on the unintelligible voices of massive spiritual forces and strange beasts.
Ripper has taken these sounds and managed to both keep them recognizable from the source material, and yet construct from them a jittery, glitchy instrumental pop song that captures the original film’s more cheerful aspects.
https://soundcloud.com/johnny_ripper/cat-soup
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/johnny_ripper. The musician is based in Montréal, Canada. More from him at twitter.com/johnny_ripper and johnnyripper.bandcamp.com.
Here, for reference, is the opening part of the Cat Soup, which appears to be much more oriented toward sound design than score, though Yutoro Teshikai has a credit for music: