The score to Takashi Miike’s film 殺し屋１ (Ichi the Killer)
is essentially a side-project from the Japanese group Boredoms, as all four members of Karera Musication (for whom this was the only release) had put time into that band as well. The score freely plays around with noise and sonic treatments (to the point of including a series of hearing test tones in the opening track, “1″), meshed with post-rock and world music in a blurry flood of riffs and melodic extrapolations. Fine-cut audio splicing comes and goes, weird vocal squeaks push into jazzy horn licks, muddy squelches drift into mad drumming into electric-sizzle guitar, traditional Chinese instrumentation is merged with dub, and so on. As free-roaming as the music is, it somehow ties all together quite well, and the quiet menace that looms up occasionally plays at nice odds with the psychopathy on display in the film.
Scrambled Brains 