Yoko Kanno

Yoko Kanno is a Japanese composer, arranger, and music producer whose work spans anime, video games, TV dramas, and films. She created the scores for *Cowboy Bebop*, *Terror in Resonance*, *Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex*, *Wolf's Rain*, *Turn A Gundam*, and *Darker than Black*. She also plays keyboard and leads the band Seatbelts, which performs many of her pieces.

Born on 18 March 1963 in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Kanno first encountered music at church with her parents. She learned piano at home and organ in kindergarten. In elementary school, she entered composition contests, but by high school, her focus shifted to literature. At Waseda University, she majored in literature while transcribing music for student groups in her spare time. Raised on classical music, she discovered rhythm through a friend who played drums in a school band. She later said that hearing drums live made her truly notice a beat for the first time, sparking a strong interest in non-classical music. She joined the band elective and studied popular music composition and style. After graduating in 1986, the game company Koei asked her to compose the soundtrack for *Nobunaga's Ambition: Zenkokuban* (1990), which became a hit and launched her career.

Her notable soundtrack themes include "Kiseki no Umi" (*Lodoss War*), "Voices" (*Macross Plus*), "Tank!" (*Cowboy Bebop*), "Yakusoku wa Iranai" (*Escaflowne*), "Gravity" (*Wolf's Rain*), the full score of *Turn A Gundam*, and "Inner Universe" (*Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex*). For the *Stand Alone Complex* soundtrack, she aimed to break down the rigid, masculine world of the original comic, focusing on a theme of "be human" and expressing a "tangible fuzziness." She composed the opening theme "Inner Universe" with an image of digital bits and quick, recurring beats.

Kanno works across genres like blues, classical, jazz, techno, and J-pop, but she does not divide music by genre when creating. Instead, she focuses on what a scene or anime requires—such as a love theme or a mood—and finds all genres equally satisfying and inspiring. She typically receives only instructions and storyboards early in production, sometimes a year or two before the animation is finished, when even the title and character names may not be set. She likes this approach because it frees her from rules during composition.