Haruomi Hosono scored a 1985 anime about cats riding a train through the cosmos and it sounds like nothing else he ever made. Night on the Galactic Railroad adapts Kenji Miyazawa's novel into pure atmosphere, and Hosono's score floats between celestial synth textures and deeply tender acoustic passages.
Read more
"Song of the Circling Stars" captures this weightless, starfield quality that just hangs in the air. "Giovanni's Heartbreak" brings everything crashing back to earth with this quiet devastation. The way "Requiem" strips everything down near the end.
"Pliocene Coast" evokes geological time with these vast, slow-moving layers. Twenty tracks spanning fantasy, grief, and wonder from a YMO founder working in a completely different mode. If you love ambient film scores that treat silence as an instrument, Hosono delivered something extraordinary here.