Tomorrow's World

Akira envisions the futuristic city through the retro-active means of the cartoon, while Alphaville does a perversely better job with the even more dated technologies of the effects-free noir gumshoe caper.

I don't speak any Japanese, but I can't imagine that the original dialogue is as breathlessly juvenile and hackneyed as the Americanised English that completely pulls the rug out from under any attempt at character development in Akira, and fragments the movie into one preposterously over-wrought and context-empty confrontation after another. There are some jaw-dropping visual tours-de-force, and the city is consistently affect-less and empty of anyone but helplessly crushed, eviscerated and torched populations. Adults are bumptious pawns; ageless, gnomic infants rule.

Alphaville is a wet, dark, oily place, punctuated with pristine white institutional interiors. The talk is laconic, bone-dry, hard-board; the characters believing so effortlessly in their own unreality that they need no sturm und drang to keep themselves powered. The most intensely present being in the film is undoubtedly the voice of Alpha 60, always answering back and demanding of the increasingly frantic private detective.

The future is harder to believe in, the brighter it gets.

Kila "Soisin"

This is a very lovely instrumental folk record, apparently taking its inspiration from the memoir of an Irishwoman who became a Buddhist saint. The tunes are slowly rolling, plaintively repetitive melodies, drifting one into the next.
Theremin, strings, flutes, undemonstrative guitar and gradually unfolding flurries percussion are the simple ingredients that crucially don't get over exposed or overproduced in anything as crass as a solo.
None of the pieces are in any kind of hurry to get anywhere and all the more limpidly beautiful for that; "Cluainin" particularly takes most of its duration to get to its melodic point and still doesn't feel as if it is wasting any time.
The element of the music that struck me the most was how much in common it has with some of the North African and Korean 'traditional' music I've been listening to. The texture of stringed instruments, the emphasis on bowing, the intense attention to establishing melodic logic before pace or repetition become an issue. Evocative and heart-worn stuff.