The first season of Shinsuke Sato’s live action science fiction series Alice In Borderland (2020, based on Haro Aso’s manga serialised between 2010 and 2016) opens with a shooter game being played on a large bedroom screen by Arisu, a self-absorbed, unemployed rich kid. The game’s audiovision is violent, meaningless, enthralling. Cut to Arisu and his slacker friends Kurabe and Chota meeting up at Tokyo’s Shibuya station. Unexpectedly, Arisu becomes conscious of something just beyond his grasp. A slow track into his face actively fades down the sound of swarming people on their way to work. A few softly played piano notes are sounded: this is a premonition of the frailty of life, which Arisu and his friends may soon lose.

After experiencing a power outage while in Shibuya station, the trio emerge onto an entirely emptied Scramble Crossing. Composer Yutaka Yamada unfurls low horn sustains and rumbling sheets of noise: something is seriously wrong here. They don’t realise it yet, but they’re in a ‘borderland’ between life and death, where they’ll be forced to play an unending series of death games. Returning individually to their work places, each realises the breadth of erasure around them. Rising multiphonic tones musicalise the omnipresent air-con ringing audible in both interior and exterior environments. Interspersed with these chordal passages are the distant looping of electronic tones, as if an electrical home appliance has been left unattended, sounding a soft warning tone, the type of which was pioneered in Japanese consumer appliances in the late 20th century.

A quick historical aside. Since the 1960s denki revolution of accelerated electronics design, music in Japan serviced industry in ways that would shape the psychoacoustic environment of the country for decades to come. Through the combination of piezoelectric actuators and 8-bit audio, beeps, tones and melodies became ubiquitous in products which sonically communicated to users. Before too long, Japan’s tightly shaped congestion of public space and close-quartered confines of private space hummed with a dissonant symphony of digi-voices, synth gongs, cute zaps and googly sonics. Alice In Borderland’s multitude of screens (from giant window displays to tiny LED lozenges) tinkle and ting incessantly, informing Arisu and company of cruel time limits and non-negotiable restrictions. Their electroacoustic world is always polite and accommodating, often guided by a recorded female voice whose obsequiousness masks its passive-aggressive manipulation, like a life-draining geisha.

That’s the sound of the world for those momentarily alive in Borderland. For those who die, the last sound they hear is a laser beam piercing their cranium. A thin red beam descends from the stratosphere – inside or outside, the result is the same – with the abrupt force of a metallic stun gun, executing loser humans like cattle. The zap is a multi-layered power punch of finality, like a distorted dubstep kick-drum fused with an anvil pounded by a red hot hammer. Similarly, Yamada’s titles theme to Alice In Borderland builds from a galleon-sized single cello note, tattooed in compound time, atop which violas fretfully saw Vivaldi-like triplets with maddening repetition. This compressed sound of morbid singularity is expressed as that last nanosecond when you realise you are about to die.

A compositional template unfolds throughout Alice In Borderland: submerged synth tones as player tension builds, contrasted with earth-shattering thwacks as gameplay logic decimates participants. Mostly, a composed noisescape engulfs each life threatening situation, overwhelming the viewer/auditor as much as it drains Arisu and his colleagues. The series is relentless with this psychoacoustic terror, recalling the electromagnetic pulse attack that initiated the creation of Borderland at the beginning in Shibuya.

The second episode of season one opens with a montage of famous tourist spots in Tokyo, each digitally modified to represent an evacuated city. Almost inaudibly, soft tonal patterns carry from afar. This is music left to perform and sound itself, in a realm where life is disallowed. To evoke pervasive death, Yamada constructs tones as if the city itself – its network of soothing ‘earcons’ and polite warning beeps – is playing itself, atmospherically dispersing its chipmunk pips like trees falling unheard in a void forest. This self-erasing compositional technique merges with the series’ sound design, rendering Borderland tonal, harmonic and musical. And forever deadly.

Each episode of Alice is ingeniously centred in an architectural domain, highlighting the unique characteristic of a space (a danchi apartment block, a botanical garden, an underpass tunnel, a resort hotel) which players must navigate to survive. Yamada’s minimal music is less an issue of style and more a thematic sounding of these spaces’ acoustic design, and how such environments – originally designed with living people in mind – have been reconfigured to hasten their demise. The simplistic tones are as non-humanist as the bleep of a dishwasher completing its cycle: it isn’t speaking to ‘you’; it is simply sounding its programmed ‘self’. The perverse psychological ploy typical in the human drama of manga and anime dark phantasmagory is that human characters attain consciousness by realising they are as socially programmed as a dishwasher. Alice In Borderland points to an entire subgenre of ‘death fantasy’ in Japan that proceeds from this premise.

Taking in seasons one and two of Alice In Borderland (2020-2022) is as draining as the emotional exhaustion experienced by its survivors, headed by Arisu. Season three (2025) radically commences well outside of the previous seasons’ mortal combats. Arisu is being interviewed by professor Matsuyama, part of a government department tasked with analysing people who in the real world have survived the initial meteorite destruction of Shibuya. An aerial panorama of a razed Shibuya evidences this reality, powerfully depicting Shibuya as a multi-tiered hive of reconstruction. The sequence is matched to a sharp organ chord, sizzling in a freeze frame of absolute devastation.

Back in his campus office, Matsuyama reviews his analysis of the near-death experiences of the Shibuya survivors. A tantalising single chord breathes in a slow pulse, again like harmonised air conditioning. The single chord carries over Matsuyama making his way across Shibuya and its mobile throngs, their ambience muted under the carpeted synth tones. This becomes emblematic of the headspace of Matsuyama, and the drive he exhibits in seeking to discover the mystery not of life, but of death. As a researcher obsessed with such a topic, he is an asocial entity – the opposite of Arisu, whose battle experience has shaped him into a caring, responsible adult, now with a wife (Usagi, his game partner from the previous two seasons).

Surprisingly, Yamada’s music seems to be mixed at a softer level in season three. Yet it retains its power and purpose, here redefined to accentuate how people are nothing but nodes moving through networks. The delicacy of tones – percussive, textual, harmonic – connotes inescapability, resignation and inevitability. Yamada’s score here acknowledges the series’ pivoting from adrenaline inducing survivalism to migraine massaging existentialism. The music is often diminutive and politely subservient to the well designed social spaces of an otherwise affluent and aspirational Tokyo. Arisu and Usagi are clearly presented as the ideal ‘new family couple’ one sees in current promotional adverts in Japan of new urban utopian housing developments.

This is where Alice In Borderland is less about the border between life and death, and more about the border between designed attainment and programmed existence. Tokyu Corporation, East Japan Railway Company and Tokyo Metro Co Ltd collectively instigated the Shibuya Station Area Project (SSAP), a masterplan of formidable scale incorporating the contemporary urbanism of architect Kengo Kuma. Preparations commenced in 2010; Phase I was finished in 2019 (Shibuya Scramble Square); Phase II commenced this year (the Central and West towers) and is due to be finished by 2030; the total development is slated for final completion in 2034. Alice In Borderland seems to deliberately skewer the SSAP and its marketing of upward mobility with cynicism. But season three is also the most emotional: as Arisu struggles to save his wife Usagi, the score swells like a treacly rendition of Scelsi drones rich in upper harmonics. Yamada’s digi-orchestral surges connote involvement, commitment and hope.

Most interestingly, silence is deployed to powerful effect, framing sonic incidents and musical moments with breathtaking precision. Yamada’s music becomes a matter of secretion, shading and residue, forwarding the notion of how nothingness sounds, and how death shapes one’s environmental consciousness. Anime has excelled in this for decades (eg the score and sound design to Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex from 2002). Yamada’s distinctive pounding drums and cello seesawing are introduced only in the last ten seconds of season three’s first episode. To some, his music may be lacking in distinction or personality. But as with so much Japanese musical composition and production, that’s precisely the point: to be something through nothingness.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy’s original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. Previous instalments of this column published on The Wire website can be found here.