Hideo Kojima on Ennio Morricone
I much prefer listening to independent podcasts made by passionate individuals over the well funded and staffed podcasts made by celebrities and organisations. The latter often take the forms of a guffawing panel who aren’t as amusing as they think they are or podcasts that are essentially radio broadcasts trespassing on different media. I often think about the kinds of conversations that are interesting to overhear on a train, the ones that make you lean in even though you know it’s not really the proper thing to do. Nobody does this when a group of loud young people want to broadcast their zaniness to the whole carriage.
I make a few exceptions for the bigger podcasts though, particularly in the case of Hideo Kojima’s Brain Structure, the Spotify podcast of the revered video game creator. It might be because Kojima is a great director of talent, able to steer a large team into realising his idiosyncratic creations and so his very well resourced and produced podcast still maintains a sense of vision and intimacy, even in how he handles the overdubbed translations of his Japanese speech on the English language version. You always get to hear Kojima’s voice in the background and the English overdub doesn’t start few a good few seconds after Kojima starts speaking so you get a real sense of the personality of the speaker. It’s a really good way of achieving a similar effect to visual subtitles in audio media.
Some episodes of Brain Structure centre around Kojima’s love of music, his episode long love/begging letter plea to collaborate with Nick Cave being a particular highlight. This week’s episode was dedicated to Ennio Morricone and it was one of my favourite listening experiences so far in this very young year. Sharing music on a podcast is a tricky thing depending on whatever Intellectual Property practice your chosen platform operates. For all of its faults, Spotify at least seems to give Kojima the opportunity to play entire songs for subscribers, while excerpts of the songs play to non subscribers.
There was something about the interplay about the usual aural set up of Kojima’s podcast and the intense, emotive consonance of Morricone’s music that worked so well. After all, the soundtracks are composed with the intention of striking up between moments of speech in the films so there was something particularly recursive pleasure in listening to Kojima speak int between the tracks.
Ultimately, the Morricone tracks piggybacked on the wistfulness I often feel after dropping the kids at school and returning to an empty nest as Mrs O’Sullivan had one of her occasional in-office days today. There is something about the heart-on-sleeve earnestness of Morricone’s compositions that finds no resistance in finding the simultaneously melancholic and joyful centre of my being. This was also helped by the bright frostiness of this morning in contrast to the damp dourness of yesterday that inspired yesterday’s haibun. It’s amazing how a little nerdy enthusiasm, big-hearted sounds and a bright but bracing day can turn a mood around.