Susumu Hirasawa - “Aria” Interview

I have attempted to translate an interview with Susumu Hirasawa where he discusses the process of making “Aria”, the theme song for the new Berserk movies.



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“Creating the music for "Berserk” is similar to the sensation of unlocking one of the restraints I’ve built up within myself.“

To original author Kentaro Miura and fans of the series alike, Susumu Hirasawa plays an essential role as the musician who performs the music for the world of "Berserk”. It is he who wrote “Aria”, the theme song for the Golden Age Arc movies. A solo with a rich melody worthy of crowning the beginning of the Berserk Saga, it embodies a spectacle interwoven by the early impulses of youth and fate.





“The fundamental themes have not changed in the slightest.”

—-Tell us about when you received the offer for this work.

To be honest, I’d heard rumors before I received an offer – that “Berserk” was going to be animated again, and that apparently it was going to be a very large-scale project. However, since the flow of the story would supposedly differ from the television series and game versions that I’ve participated in thus far, I wondered if I might not receive an offer this time. Then Miura-sensei, the director Toshiyuki Kubooka, and other members of the staff came to my live performance. It wasn’t especially formal – Miura-sensei said, “We’ve finally decided to do it, so…”, and I replied, “Ah, that’s right”. In that way, through a very natural course of events, I accepted the offer.

—-What kind of song did they request you make?

Luckily, Miura-sensei is a fan of my music and listens to it while he works, and it seems I got the offer in light of this background. I’ve actually almost never received a specific song request from him because of that. As before, both Sensei and the director said, “It would be best if you made it as you normally would”. There was one thing, however – since the Golden Age Arc depicts the characters in their youth, I was asked to create something in that kind of youthful image, and so I incorporated that nuance in my own style.

—-What served as the source of inspiration for the song?

I requested that the director give me a single piece of material to serve as a visual reference, and so he sent me a still of the scene where Griffith receives the Behelit from the fortune-teller. From this one scene I was able to expand on the world’s atmosphere. In my experience, the more and greater variety of material I receive, such as continuities and scenarios and so on, the less I come to understand it, and consequently I decided to ask for only one thing. For example, even if what I imagined from this still went in a different direction from what the director intended, in that case I think it highly likely that it would have a favorable influence on the scope of the work.

—-Is there anything you’ve become aware of with the movie?

The fundamental themes, from the time when I first had my chance to become involved in the world of “Berserk” by working on the TV series, have not changed in the slightest. Of course this is a movie, and I built up the sound production on a sense of scale that would suit that environment, but since the essential elements in pursuing this sense of scale have themselves in recent years been close to the direction of my own work, I was able to arrive at this song without changing my own style.





“Opposing concepts exist in equal amounts.”

—-How did you proceed to compose the song?

I completed the composition itself over the course of about two short, intensive weeks. Then I started recording it. In August of 2011, in order to commemorate exceeding 50,000 followers on Twitter, I planned to broadcast scenes of me working via Ustream, but included among them are scenes of me making this song. Although I had broadcast the audio itself and the recording of the vocals separately, one of the fans worked it out by taking the Ustream video and the sound source used in the movie trailer and putting them together. Amazing.

—-How did you make the lyrics that you sing so dramatically?

They’re “Hirasawa-ese” (Hirasawa-go), so to speak. While inspired by the language and such used in the world of “Berserk”, I wrote them like a spell, constructing it so that the echo of the words carries a single view of its world. If I were to write the lyrics in a specific language, then that would instantly limit the way you understand the world. In that case, there’s a chance I might disrupt the images carried by individual viewers. Of course there are ways to forcibly express a specific image, but I myself feel that the fun of it lies precisely in what’s born from that lack of restrictions.

—-What do you feel is the appeal of “Berserk”?

I think the appeal of “Berserk” all comes down to the fact that opposing concepts like light and darkness, beauty and ugliness, good and evil and so on exist in equal amounts. I myself deeply sympathize with that state of things. It’s not unusual for creators to do things like censor themselves during the writing process in accordance with the context of the story and so on, but for the most part I don’t feel that “Berserk” has such limitations. On the contrary, I even feel freedom. Consequently, for me, creating the music for “Berserk” is similar to the sensation of unlocking one of the restraints I’ve built up within myself. Once unlocked, and the censoring part of me removed, the music becomes “Berserk”.

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Notes:

For those of you who wish to read the interview in Japanese, it originally appeared in a special book that was published when the first of the new movies came to theaters. (Said book includes interviews of similar length with various other people who worked on the film.)

