Interest

British Band Creates Alternative Spirited Away Soundtrack

The British music group Haiku Salut, which describes itself as "an instrumental dream-pop-post-folk-neo-everything trio from the Derbyshire Dales," has created an alternative soundtrack to Hayao Miyazaki's film Spirited Away.

This soundtrack is mostly made up of newly edited tracks from the group's back catalogue, plus one new piece of music. It is available as an EP, called Songs for Chihiro, and also available as a Spotify playlist, called Spirited Away: An Alternative Soundtrack.

On the group's website, Sophie Barkerwood of Haiku Salut explains, "We're all big fans of Studio Ghibli... We realised that with the Ghibli collection on Netflix at the moment we may be able to re-score a film with our music. There wasn't any discussion about which film we would pick. Spirited Away has long since been a favourite, so spooky and other-worldly.

"Initially there were ideas to do a new score entirely. We started to sequence our back catalogue to the film to see how this might work. Then small coincidences started appearing. Tiny synchronicities. When we began the film and our music were entirely separate entities but as we pieced more and more of it together they somehow came to be meaningfully related. It felt strange and exciting. We hope you feel the same way."

The group will hold two watch parties of its Spirited Away soundtrack on June 14, at 2 p.m and 6 p.m. BST, with visitors invited to listen to the soundtrack while watching a copy of the film (for example, on Blu-ray or Netflix). There are more details here. The Twitter hashtag will be #songsforchihiro. These watch parties are free, but for any donations, 50% will go to Black Lives Matter UK, and 50% to Music Venue Trust.

Haiku Salut plays accordion, piano, glockenspiel, trumpet, guitar, ukulele, drums, and melodica, and their music also has electronic elements. The group's works include an original contemporary score for Buster Keaton's silent comedy classic The General.