When the opportunity arises, and Halloween appears to fall on a date I’d like to share some new bit of music, I dig into my collection for albums that fit certain frights. This time around, no album seems quite as appropriate to shed some light on as the little-known soundtrack for the OVA Psycho Diver: Mashō Bosatsu サイコダイバー 魔性菩薩 (otherwise known as Psycho Diver: Soul Siren outside of Japan), サイコダイバ- オリジナルサウンドトラック, an honestly unique, dark blend of cybernetic techno and weirdly quasi-spiritually-inspired music.
Of course, before I begin, I should share a disclaimer: spoilers ahead.
Psycho Diver: Mashō Bosatsu サイコダイバー 魔性菩薩 belongs in the category of early “cyber-dive” anime or films that appeared in the mid-to-late ’90s like Ghost In The Shell, inspired by films like Blade Runner or Scanners, inspiring films like The Matrix. At the dawn of the internet age, newly minted anime like it were moving away from the allure of a digital future into some sort of examination of the horrors awaiting us in a world more and more controlled by computer technology.
Psycho Diver originated in the mid ’80s, sourced out of the appropriately named Baku Yumemakura’s 魔性菩薩, a science fiction novel that centered on the idea of a “psycho dive”. Beginning with his 魔獣狩りシリーズ (Demon Beast Hunter Series), in some unknown future, people who have gone through all sorts of trauma or inflicted it on others are able to free themselves from its grasp by hooking up to specialized equipment connected to specialists who are able to sever that link from their mind — as the monsters we fear are (mostly) inside us. These so-called “psycho-divers” use telepathic technology to re-assert control from demonic forces with varying degrees of success. Failure on their part could always result in the loss of life (including their own). And surprisingly, although one had to be licensed to be a psycho-diver, the best were so-called “independents” who came to it on their own.
In 1997, Toei Video produced an animated adaptation directed by Mamoru Kanbe that fit in the universe but was a loose adaptation of the original novel. Running just 48 minutes long, and originally released on VHS and LaserDisc, Psycho Diver: Mashō Bosatsu サイコダイバー 魔性菩薩 followed its main character, Busujima Jūta, an independent psycho-diver, who is enlisted to take on a most-dangerous case.
The film opens with a gruesome failure. A fellow diver is seen screaming in pain before his head bursts in the diving machine. The only presence next to him is pop singer Yuki Kanō, whose own ESP powers somehow found a way to throw him out, exploding him with thoughts his body and mind couldn’t control.
It’s then we learn that her manager, Kyōko Ayuhara, had enlisted psycho-divers to try to help her client escape the grasp of a shadowy cult called Gordon. Losing both control over life and her voice, Yuki’s only hope lies in Busujima, who isn’t quite clear just how tough this job will be.
In hindsight, we get to see that those tormenting Yuki are really her two estranged parents. Unbeknown to Yuki, one of them, her father, wants to exploit her fame and influence as a pop singer for money and power. The other, her mother, wants Yuki to take over as the cult’s next leader to promote their dark religion. It’s a power struggle to control Yuki’s innate telepathic powers. Not lost in the film is Yuki’s own dark awakening and embrace of it from a young age.
It’s only when Kyōko, Yuki’s only truly caring connection, is murdered by the cult that Busujima goes “all in” and digs deeper into who exactly is behind all of this, that he too has been used by those same shadowy figures. Then, what began as a sort of cyber-thriller transforms into a futuristic, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ero guro, a carnival of grotesque eroticism that splits the difference between titillating suspense and drama. Somewhere in its denouement we’re left to question who really are the worst of the bad ones — the religious fanatics, the cultural influencers, or the power-at-all-cost cyber-forward technocrats. In hindsight, this horror is what stayed lingering with me from the story.
When Busujima finally frees Yuki, his parting gift is a CD featuring the music her manager would never get a chance to hear. Art prevailing after so much evil. And running at just 48 minutes, about as long as the movie itself, its own real-life CD soundtrack captures the movie’s underlying themes better than the film itself. Composed by five artists — Akihiko Hirama, TA-1 (Taichi Kaneko), Sorma, Garden, and Kazuto Shimizu — and featuring four tracks sung by Junko Iwao (credited as her character, Yuki Kanō), サイコダイバ- オリジナルサウンドトラック adapted the atmosphere of this story as a mix of minimal techno and ethno-ambient music going through a rabbit-hole of existential darkness.
Before the video was released in May 1997 and the album in June, lead single “The End” arrived in April and provided only hints of what lay ahead. By far the album’s most straightforward track, this gray bit of techno-rock, written by the twins of Garden (otherwise known as Nico) and played over the film’s end credits, gave one a synopsis of the story and Yuki’s struggle, sung in character by Junko. However, it was its pseudo-B-side, “Warfare-Beware”, the OVA’s opening song, also sung by Junko but written by J-Rap producer TA-1, that gave you a better taste of the far darker side of this soundtrack. It was its mix of hard-nosed lyricism and dark, quasi-mystical dancehall and techno that spoke clearer to the intentions of those involved.
The album opens with “Бог Отец” (God The Father), a bit of choral music sung in Russian, scene-setting the tone of the album. “The End” plunges you into the darkness, thematically, driving the atmosphere of the movie. Then TA-1’s “Psycho-Diving” creates music that puts you in that wormhole of cybernetic thought. Featuring what sounds like mangled religious chants and metallic percussion, a floating synth pad tries to triangulate the peg of what is some haunting ambient-techno music. The core of this album is this obtuse meeting of dreams with reality.
Ambient group Sorma tunes into a similar wavelength as TA-1, using “The Soldier Blue” to squeeze from jungle or breakbeat their own haunting tone, pitch-shifted, time-stretched out through their own sonorism, approaching a wiggier version of the style. Akihiko Hirama, formerly of Jadoes, uses “Angelica”, inspired by Yuki’s mother, as its own fascinating bit of progressive techno. Resonating with quasi-exotic, pseudo-mystical-sounding sounds, the track revolves around your headphones with synths that approximate breath and slipstream, percussion that approximates cavernous knocks, and quietly creeping beats.
TA-1’s next track, “Bar 婆羅門”, cements the mood サイコダイバ- オリジナルサウンドトラック is after, and it’s one of displacement. On it, woozy, grimy trip-hop makes its journey to the land of drowned sorrows. Akihiko Hirama’s next track, “Chase!”, goes into the well of dark techno-rock, landing on something that doesn’t flow as future-forward. Things are “righted”, though, on Sorma’s next track, “Requiem From The Labyrinth”, transporting their usually spiritually-inspired sound into the realm of 1s and 0s, finding something far more sinister lurking under their soundscape, creating something both ancient-sounding and plunging down with digital aliasing and artifacts.
Without retreading territory I already covered, we skip forward to Kazuto Shimizu’s sole track, one heard playing at a piano bar in the film. “Elegy” gives us a bit of breathing room with a piano performance full of the impressionistic ideas that are a trademark of Shimizu’s best-known work.
It’s this not-quite-sad, not-quite-hopeful, not-quite-horror track that distills the spirit of the bigger series. The album ends on Akihiko Hirama’s “Sunset Cross”, a haunting ambient meditation zeroed in on the drone of a didgeridoo giving way to the leitmotif of the album and film, a hall-of-mirrors effect, played on electronic pads, collapsing under the weight of human breath giving it form and figure. Although the rare soundtrack would disappear sooner than the film it existed in, laced with meaning, one can’t help to discover that there are still ghosts in this infernal machine, at least on this Halloween.
