Kensuke Ushio isn’t a typical anime soundtrack composer. He has deconstructed Bach compositions, used watercolor painting on sheet music, and merged traditional Japanese biwa music with EDM. It makes total sense, then, that he was chosen to compose the soundtrack for the anime adaptation of the deeply experimental and fresh Chainsaw Man. We had the chance to interview Ushio about how he got connected to the production, using AI to create brand new sounds, and even cutting up and distorting music to match the violence of a chainsaw!
 

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 Crunchyroll: Thank you so much for joining us again, for, I think the fourth interview we’ve done together. The Chainsaw Man anime has been pretty amazing so far.

 

Kensuke Ushio: Thank you for having me, and for saying that. This anime has been such a huge, huge thing to work on.
 

My first question is actually related to that. How did you first become involved with the Chainsaw Man production?
 

Ushio: It’s a bit complex. So, in the beginning it was actually the staff that worked on Ping Pong the Animation approached me and told me that a director and producer of a certain anime show was looking for my contact. I’m on really good terms with the staff of Ping Pong, we are good friends. I said, “yeah, go ahead,” and they gave my information to the person in question and… well, here we are. This was the project they were thinking of!
 

That’s such a huge project to suddenly be a part of! How did you feel when you were going to be working on Chainsaw Man?
 

Ushio: [gesturing wildly] Oh, my gosh! [laughter] But seriously, in my previous works, they were more subtle, they had a more “adult” feel to the title, you know? It’s a more real, subtle, complex feeling. But Chainsaw Man is a really big Jump [a manga magazine sold in Japan] battle title. I had a certain nervous feeling about it. I felt, “this is my first challenge.”
 

I’m really happy you brought that up, because I’ve got a question about that late on. With your work, on the one hand, way over here, you have A Silent Voice and Liz and the Blue Bird, and all the way over on the other side you have Chainsaw Man.
 

Ushio: Yes, a completely different type. This guy [gestures at hoodie with logo], Aphex Twin, this kind of dance music is also my root music. When I read the original Chainsaw Man manga, I thought to myself, “maybe there’s something I can do, maybe there is something I can contribute to this work.”
 

When I read Chainsaw Man as it was publishing, I usually imagined very intense music in my head. But there are these quiet moments of beautiful connection between characters, and I thought of your music in those moments.
 

Ushio: Oh, really?!
 
 

Yes! It’s so crazy that you ended up working on the soundtrack.
 

Ushio: [laughter] I saw a YouTube comment on a video upload of one of my previous tracks and the comment said, “this would be perfect for CSM.” So, it was like a prophet, you know?
 

 

So, what did you think when first reading Chainsaw Man?
 

Ushio: To be honest, I had only read one or two chapters of Chainsaw Man when it was published free as an online promotion for Jump Comics, and there was a lot of hype from Japanese manga otaku and people in the industry, so I checked it out. 
 
My first thought was, “what a mess! This comic is really a mess!” Everyone kills each other. Someone’s always saying, “hey, let’s kill Denji!” What a mess… So, at the beginning I wanted the music to be “what a mess!” type of music. This was my initial thought, you know? It was interesting and funny and a completely revolutionary comic, I think. 

 
Yeah, there’s something about Chainsaw Man that doesn’t feel like anything else.

 
Ushio: Yeah, yeah. It completely changed everything.

 
What about Chainsaw Man do you feel is so revolutionary compared with other shonen manga?

 
Ushio: Generally, in Jump, there’s three principles: friendship, effort, and victory. Chainsaw Man is completely different. Of course, there’s some kind of victory, some kind of friendship, some kind of effort, but it’s a really different form. It’s completely different from other titles. But still, the comic has original emotion to it and great battle scenes. It represents a new generation, I thought. 

 
Definitely. I think there’s something with most other shonen manga where you sort of feel safe. You have those three elements you were talking about — friendship, effort, victory — and you know that the story will follow that, and you sort of know what to expect. That’s not something negative, I think that’s actually something really strong that shonen manga can do, but with Chainsaw Man… it feels like real life. It feels like anything can happen. But you have these beautiful moments you can pull out of the chaos.

 
Ushio: I think so. People smoke. They have want to have sex. They have really brutal lives. It’s really different. 
 
You know, even before the anime, the original manga got such huge hype. The manga industry is really huge in Japan. The market has sort of matured already. So to see something so revolutionary, a masterpiece like Chainsaw Man come out is an incredible thing to witness. 
 
If my name was still known 100 years from now, on Wikipedia or something, people will look at my name and say, “oh, he’s the one who lived in the same era as Tatsuki Fujimoto.” That will be how people will identify me because that’s how impressive he is.
 

Jeez wow, yeah. I haven’t read any of Fujimoto’s work before Chainsaw Man, but I have read Look Back, and it was just masterful.

 
Ushio: Regarding Look Back, it’s so powerful and it’s so emotional. But his work is able to stir up something in people’s hearts like that. That work is so powerful and impressive and that’s just the sort of creator he is.
 

Going back to Chainsaw Man, I’ve read in other interviews that you wanted to chop the music up as if you were cutting it up with a chainsaw. Could you tell me a little bit more about that philosophy and how you came up with it?
 

Ushio: This comic is “what a mess,” so the music is going to be “what a mess” music. So I distorted it, I stretched it, I chopped it. This is the concept of the music for Chainsaw Man. “What a mess!”

 
I see. Did you use a lot of digital distortion? Or manipulation and editing software… stuff like that?
 

Ushio: Yes, but the way I tried to do it is old-school style. I made cuts in the audio workstation, not through a program. 24/7 I was always doing it! Endlessly editing waveforms, day in and day out. It was very manual and very difficult. I also collaborated with Sony Computer Science Laboratories. We made a special AI for the Chainsaw Man project to create a unique sound between the chainsaw sound and the drum sound. We had a really good collaboration to make that AI. I also worked with my friend, a programmer, and we created an original program for the chainsaw beats, like [imitates the chainsaw noise] to create that “what a mess” sound. It was a really nice, first-time experience for me. I believe it works well for this title. 
 
 

I totally agree! I think it really gets across that “mess” feeling — the chaos and the violence. You can feel how the characters’ lives get stretched and distorted by everything happening to them, you can feel that in the music.

 

Ushio: [gesturing at the Aphex Twin logo on his hoodie] This icon… I think I might need this sort of symbol! 
 
 

[both laugh]
 
 

Yes, you do! 

 

 

Did you have any particular musicians or producers that influenced your work on this series, or did you come in focused purely on that theme of “what a mess?”

 
Ushio: To be honest the Aphex Twin feeling, or the kind of IDM [intelligent dance music] music… that feeling is the result of my concept work. I wouldn’t actually list a name because it’s more of something I would notice looking back on it, not a purposeful influence beforehand. This is something I drew out of the theme and the impression of the original work. 
 

You usually have like a very unique and interesting relationship with the director of the series or the movies that you work on. What was your collaboration with Ryū Nakayama like?

 
Ushio: I’ve been working with a lot of anime directors so far, and they’ve been young up-and-coming directors, but this is the first time I’ve worked with a director that’s actually younger than I am! [laughs] So, he relied on me instead of the other way around, which was a new experience. 
 
Besides that, though, we talked with each other really deeply about our favorite films and our favorite music. After that conversation, we set our goal for the series, so it really works well. I believe that our relationship is really deep. It’s really nice. 

 
That’s so cool! In the anime itself, in the opening theme song, there’s so many references to different movies and Tatsuki Fujimoto loves different movies, so it feels like you connecting with the director on this level is really beneficial to the heart of Chainsaw Man.

 
Ushio: I think so. Those things make us a team. It really works well.  

 
The Chainsaw Man manga is known just as much for its comedy as much as its action. There’s a lot of really funny stuff that happens. Was it challenging to balance these funnier, lighter moments with the crazy action and the sadder, dramatic elements in the music?

 
Ushio: Basically, with my concept being “mess music,” I did edit it after I composed it. I would compose some comedy themed tracks and then I chopped it. I edited it. I composed really funny songs and then I distorted them. That’s how I tried to make the Chainsaw Man music unique. 
 
 

Have you heard of the hip hop genre chopped and screwed? These techniques honestly remind me of that.
 

Ushio: I know about that culture, and I know about screwing things down, slowing it down to give texture to the music. For me, I don’t think I was going for a hip hop style, I come from the more experimental music side of things, but I used similar methods for reaching this sound. I see the connection.

 
Chainsaw Man takes place in a world that is very violent. If you were living in this world, on any given day you could die if a devil comes by. It’s really awful and scary. But the characters are still able to build these meaningful connections to one another. The series is very funny and very action-packed, but the characters feel like real people. I feel like your music connects me to these characters. How did you think about the individual characters and trying to get across their feelings?

 
Ushio: Normally, I would use noises from the actual real world and incorporate that into the music, but I didn’t do that with this show. That’s probably because I was trying to empathize with the feelings and emotions that the characters were feeling, and I didn’t think that the actual existing noise in the real world fit into that. That is why I made the music that way and is probably why you felt what you felt. 

 
I think that’s amazing and it shows that you really understand these characters and want to share the inside of them with the world.

 
Ushio: Since I started my own solo project, I never sing. There’s never lyrics. It’s just an instrumental track. Because music is… wider than the lyrics. For example, let’s say I’m composing a kind, gentle track. Besides the feeling of kindness and gentleness, there might also be the smaller feeling of, “oh, I’m a little hungry,” or, “oh, I don’t want to go to work.” A person doesn’t ever have just one feeling, they’re a mixture of feelings. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do with my music. Chainsaw Man is sad and heart-wrenching as a story, but there might be those smaller feelings of, “oh, I’m hungry,” or, “oh, I’m tired.” I wanted people to feel not just one feeling, but that mixture of feelings that people have in daily life. That might be why you felt like this music is expressing the feelings of real people. It’s so difficult to explain.

 
Yeah, I think I understand it. I think a lot of the time in music, especially in soundtracks, I feel like the songs are just trying to get me to feel one single emotion. It’s really impressive to create a song and think, “I don’t just want to express happiness, but also the other miniature feelings and thoughts that weave together to form this one state of a human being.”

 
Ushio: So when I was creating the background music for this show, I talked to the director, and we asked, “what is the role of the music?” Rather than the music serving as a rail that the viewer is put on forcing them to feel one way or another… we didn’t want the music to be that. We wanted it to be a light that shines in the direction of where they should be going, but not exactly how to get there. That’s the role we saw for the music in the show.

 

 

I’m glad that you brought that up, because I only have one more question. With a lot of music, it’s just a listening experience. You sit down and you listen. But with soundtracks you have both the audio part and the visual part, soundtracks exist connected to this piece of visual media. I wanted to ask, how does that connection inform your work?
 

Ushio: As a film composer, not as a listener or a fan, when I compose film music, the film defines a time scale. When the character stands up and it takes 1.5 seconds, I need 1.5 seconds of music, you know? As a solo artist, I can do what I want without that restriction. I can make the sounds last for 10 minutes or however long. This film-defined time scale is a really unique experience for musicians. It’s really interesting for me as a composer. For you as a listener, maybe you only feel the feelings, but the technical aspect as a composer, it’s really interesting to me. 

 
I actually was talking with someone about this recently, like the difference between the experience of reading a book versus watching a film. In the book you control the pace, you can spend as much time as you like on a page, but in a film, the director controls exactly what you see at any given moment. 

 
Ushio: There’s also the aspect of… for example, if I am acting as just a solo artist, I wouldn’t do tracks as brutal as the music on this soundtrack. It’s really interesting! It’s exciting to be a film composer.

 
 Building off of that, what do you think the ideal purpose of a soundtrack is?

  
Ushio: It varies. It’s different depending on which film I work on. But for Chainsaw Man, as I said earlier, it should be the light of the film. If there is more of a red light, it might lead to an attack or brutal scene. If it’s a more off-white or blue light, maybe it’s more of a gentle scene. The light does not suggest strongly where to go. The light does not make people feel sad or angry, but it expresses the atmosphere of the film. I hope that my music acts as the light for the audience.

 

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Listen to Kensuke Ushio’s music for Chainsaw Man here, and watch Chainsaw Man here on Crunchyroll! 

 

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Cayla Coats is the Editorial Partnerships Manager at Crunchyroll. She tweets @ceicocat and you can watch her rarely updated YouTube channel here.