Words by Gunseli Yalcinkaya

From the very beginning, the titular protagonist of American-Korean director Kogonada’s latest film After Yang is looking at the world from the outside-in. Yang (Justin H. Min) is a cultural technosapian, an artificially intelligent robot that has been purchased by Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) to care for their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and teach her about her Chinese heritage. But when Yang suddenly shuts down and won’t restart, the family embarks on the painful journey of grieving his loss. 

With its focus on family and memory, After Yang eschews the glossy cityscapes associated with sci-fi narratives. Flying cars or Westworld-style mechanics are traded in for soft domestic scenes and natural settings that reveal the inner emotions of the characters. Everyday sounds like birds chirping in the background and the rustling noises of trees evoke a sense of familiarity – and the soundtrack, composed by Aska Matsumiya, bolsters this emotional warmth. Soft wooden instrumentation is juxtaposed with synths that have been processed via machine learning to conjure a dreamlike sound that feels distinctly futuristic. “We wanted to make sure that the sound was both new and futuristic, but also very human at the same time,” explains Matsumiya over Zoom. “It’s a paradox because, even though it’s set in the future, it is important to return to the essence of humanity – to stay in touch with our human side.”

The Japanese, Malibu-based composer is known for her genre-defying works that span Crystal Moselle’s New York-based skateboarding comedy series Betty, a frenetic mix of laid-back shoegaze and kinetic trap beats, to K-pop group Blackpink’s 2020 documentary Light Up the Sky and Bruised, a Netflix drama directed by and starring Halle Berry about a female MMA fighter. She’s worked on commercials for luxury fashion brands like Chanel and Prada and scored Spike Jonze’s 2010 short film, I’m Here. “I don’t feel barriers with my music,” she explains. “Playing the piano since a young age has allowed me to feel this free face of music. It’s like I know how to speak another language.”

After Yang opens with the protagonist looking at his family through the lens of a camera. “So much of the melodies for After Yang came from the character of Yang himself, even though he’s not really there for most of the film,” explains Matsumiya. “It was important for me that the audience feels the presence of Yang throughout the film.” A careful piano melody permeates the shot, hatching like the crack of dawn. It’s a deceptively simple piece, with just enough space between the notes for a warm synth to seep through the cracks. “What’s important is the internal journey of a character. It’s one person’s perspective of moving through a story,” she adds. “We all have our internal sounds and melodies within ourselves.”

Matsumiya describes taking a “melody-first” approach, using Yang’s opening theme as the crux of the score to build on using different instruments and variations. On “In the World of My Breath”, for example, sweeping string arrangements and added percussion invoke a sense of giddy excitement. “These things have a life of their own. Once you tap into that initial idea, it opens up the whole world surrounding it,” she says. “After (developing) Yang’s song, it became so clear what sort of sounds I needed to explore.” 

This is most powerful in the scene where Jake, having newly discovered a memory box in Yang’s head, begins to scroll through them using a three-dimensional digital interface. Made using an AI plugin, the music takes on the amorphous quality of a screensaver – or menu music. It unfurls gradually, blurring together solemn-sounding organ melodies with abstract electronics and faint robotic bleeps, like a robot trying to make sense of its human inputs. “Luke from Lucky Dragons created the AI plugin, especially for this project. We ran many variations of my music through the system until it started to recognise the sound patterns. It's like you're feeding like a newborn baby by giving it new references every day,” explains Matsumiya. “It was an in-between world where the AI was trying to understand what my sound was, which makes it unconventional and beautiful because it’s something I could never make.”

As Jake unfolds new bits of Yang’s memories, he learns of the richness and intensity of his emotional life. He starts to unearth a past he didn’t know his artificial son had, including a secret relationship with a clone Ada (Haley Lu Richardson). He watches each clip as you would a home movie and realises how distant he’s become from his own family. “I love films that don’t have a written emotional climax,” says Matsumiya. “Many films tell you how to feel at certain points – After Yang doesn’t have that.” Instead, accompanying this realisation is Oscar-winning Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose track “Memory Bank” perfectly captures the scene’s pathos. Recalling the haunting chord progressions of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, the four-minute classical piece begins solemnly as a simple piano melody, before breaking into a full-bodied string arrangement, revealing both Sakamoto’s penchant for repetition and release.

“I’m a huge fan of Ryuichi Sakamoto – like, diehard fan,” Matsumiya confesses. She recalls a time when she was 16 years old, waiting outside one of his shows “just to catch a glance” of the prolific artist. “We didn’t work together on After Yang, but we met in New York for tea. I tried to keep it really cool, but internally I was freaking out,” she says, adding: “He’s such a gentleman. He has the sensitivity of an artist. I feel like many artists are more in touch with their feminine side. He had that and he was such a gentleman. Honestly, the whole time I thought I was floating in the air, so it’s hard to recall what we spoke about.”

The two composers worked on their music separately, with Sakamoto sharing his track with Matsumiya in the beginning stages of the soundtrack process. “I did a few variations based on his melody. It wasn’t so much collaboration, but that we shared the same platform to do the music, which is enough for me,” she says. “Coexisting with Ryuichi Sakamoto in any way makes me happy.”

Instead of focusing on the high-budget special effects and fast-paced visuals usually associated with sci-fi narratives, After Yang’s appeal lies in its subtlety. Kogonada subverts these tropes, preferring character-driven plotlines in the form of simple vignettes that unfurl like memories. Whether Yang is watching Mika practice the violin or looking at his own reflection to the sound of faint mechanical whirs, each moment is deeply personal, akin to flicking through a family photo album. “I love films that have many emotions and nuances that you can’t gauge. I feel like that's what I'm constantly looking for, in art or music or anything that I expose myself to,” agrees Matsumiya. “People asked me like, what this film is about? The answer is, I don't know. It's layers and layers of emotion.” 

There is, however, one scene in the film where technology takes a playful turn. During the opening credits, the family takes part in an at-home dancing competition, depicted as a kaleidoscopic montage where families of four across the world engage in a series of synchronised Dance Revolution-style routines. The accompanying track is a flashy, futuristic medley that sits somewhere in between Yellow Magic Orchestra’s frenetic techno-pop and the wobbling dubstep of early noughties London. Similarly, a haunting Mitski cover of the song “Glide”, which first appeared in the 2001 film All About Lily Chou-Choi, infuses the closing credits with an indie-pop sensibility. “I wanna be just like a melody/ Just like a simple sound/ Like in harmony,” croons Mitski, filling the listener with pangs of longing. 

This focus on Yang’s inner world, and the use of natural, sophorous soundscapes, recalls the nature-inspired sounds of Japanese environmental music, which emerged in the 80s to soundtrack the country’s economic boom (Ryuichi Sakamoto’s track “Dolphins” features in a 2018 compilation of the genre). Composers would build audio decor for specific environments inspired by nature to serve as a way to soothe listeners from the onset of new technologies, like Muji shops or adverts for audio equipment. Similarly, Matsumiya’s slow and subtle score uses nature as a way to carve out Yang’s personal interior, where soft instrumentation becomes a way of dissipating the boundaries between man and machine. “I’m a big fan of that sort of music,” she agrees.

Despite her classical training, Matsumiya traces her experimental approach to music to her teenage years, when she dropped out of art school to go touring with punk bands. “I just quit,” she begins. “I was in high school and everyone in the band was older than me. I never even thought to ask anyone for permission.” This renegade approach would imbue Matsumiya with the freedom to go beyond the formal constraints of classical music. “With classical music, you’re supposed to translate what's already written in the purest form possible. I found freedom in punk because I didn't realise how much I felt suppressed by classical music – even though I love it.”

Matsumiya would perform in punk and electronic bands until her late twenties, when her longtime friend and collaborator Crystal Moselle invited her to work on her award-winning documentary The Wolfpack, about a group of homeschooled children in New York’s Lower East Side. “It shook me so much because I'd been such a classical music nerd up until that point. My dream was to be like a classical pianist. But then I was exposed to the punk scene and I was like, holy shit. It turned my life upside down.”

Closing the conversation, she reflects on the experience of working on After Yang as a deeply personal one: “I felt closest to this film compared to other films I’ve worked on. It was the feeling, the pace. It was creatively one of the most exciting projects to work on – and I love Kogonada as a director, he’s such a beautiful person,” she says. “You're in a space of solitude but you're not because in that space you're so connected. And you're not alone like you're overwhelmed by the connection.”