Who composed Akira's music?

Geinoh Yamashirogumi is not a band in any normal sense. Founded and led by Shoji Yamashiro, the professional name of researcher Tsutomu Ohashi, it gathers roughly a hundred members from ordinary working lives, engineers, students, teachers and scientists, devoted to recreating the traditional musics of the world with scholarly precision. Otomo was a fan, and originally approached the group for extracts from their album Ecophony Rinne. By the account preserved in the soundtrack's own reissue notes, they answered with entirely new music instead.

Otomo's brief, reported by the Japan Times, was famously loose: write a festival piece and a requiem, and otherwise do what you want. Yamashiro's reply, quoted since, was that he simply wrote totally self indulgent music he wanted to hear. When Otomo later brought the rush animation and storyboards, Yamashiro fell for the film and composed the whole score. Much of it was still written and recorded ahead of the finished picture, music first, in the order film scoring almost never works.

The sound itself is a collision nobody else could have staffed: Balinese gamelan and bamboo jegog ensembles, Buddhist shomyo and Noh chant, massed voices chanting the names Kaneda and Tetsuo as percussion, all fused with 1980s synthesisers tuned toward gamelan scales. The album came out in two forms in 1988 alone, the pure Symphonic Suite Akira and an alternate soundtrack mixing score with film dialogue, and the Suite remains the version reissued, remastered and pressed to vinyl for new listeners ever since.