Music Inspired by Anime - Sex Sells Interview with Raymond M

Written by Ross Locksley on 06 Sep 2024

It's amazing what you come across when browsing Bandcamp, oftentimes the album cover will be key to gaining interest. Having been drawn in by an anime style cover and the provocative "Sex Sells" moniker, I listened to an album that was certainly not what I expected. I was lucky enough to have a chat with "Raymond. M", the composer, to ask him how and why anime inspired his musical journey.

Ramond M describes the work as:

“The second-best anime-inspired album since Daft Punk’s ‘Discovery' and the album with the sexiest album cover since Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland’."

You can listen along by visiting the album page: Sex Sells on Bandcamp.

Hi Raymond, thanks for taking our questions. What was the main inspiration for the album? The spur that got you started?

Thank you for the questions asked. MXQ coincidentally is an initialism for ‘Macrocosmic Expansion Queries’ which is a riff on Excel Saga, a Japanese anime/cartoon I used to watch when I was an electronica-obsessed, hormonal teenager. One of the characters was called the Great Will of the Macrocosm and she’d be omnipresent and sarcastic and the ‘X’ was an obsession with the letter ‘X’ I had since childhood and ‘Q’ is my second favourite letter in the alphabet. MXQ was found largely based on a brief but kind of bizarre obsession with anime and this is my homage to the art-form in a way Daft Punk could never do.

But back to the question, I made "Sex Sells?" Mainly as satirical protest hence the title. Protest against algorithms and ’shock art’ getting attention so what better way than to show an attractive anime-style woman on the album cover to get young men’s attention. And the album was an excuse to experiment finally with using GarageBand on a MacBook Pro finally instead of creating sounds via an iPad that I felt was a tad basic for my involved music process. All done without a MIDI synth or expensive kit, completely on a MacBook butterfly keyboard. Paying the price for it, need to replace the ‘R’ key. 

How long did it take to complete?

Surprisingly one or two weeks due to new, cheaper, faster technology. When I’m in my creative headspace, I drive the motorway to creativity past the speed limit and embrace it. “Fear of a French Planet” I largely made within the span of four days on an iPad.

The enigmatic Raymond M

Listening to "Space Rover", there's an experimental feel to the experience which put me in mind of 70's prog rock bands like YES, was this genre a conscious influence? I didn't see it listed in the genre types, but to me it feels like a good fit. 

Electronic music is my favourite genre and the genre I am most comfortable experimenting with but alternative rock, jazz, industrial, and experimental influences do appear. What you may’ve heard was the spacey basslines and the Pink Floyd-ish synth stabs, I did on purpose to throw the audience a curveball. Every album I do there maybe an overarching theme but there are different, unique styles in each song. “Space Rover” highlights, in an anime sense, the more sinister, moody, ambient elements of anime OST music as if you may hear it in Serial Experiments Lain while “Dream Pop’d” you may hear in Texhnolyze, “Alien from the Darkness” (which is a giveaway) but you may hear in Speed Grapher or Boogiepop Phantom? I was influenced greatly by those two anime musically as well as the music of Warp and Ninja Tune. 

For me it's an album to stop and feel the world spin to, given the sporadic beats and rapidly shifting tempo between tracks (and sometimes in them). It'd certainly be a good album to contemplate an anime like Serial Experiments Lain to (Moody Lucy feels very Lain), are there any anime series you'd slot one of your tracks into?

All the great albums of my lifetime ("Music Has The Right to Children" by Boards of Canada, "I Care Because You Do" by Aphex Twin, the 2001 Gorillaz debut which is the first album I bought with my pocket change) are all so varied in scope, no one song is alike. I generally make music without regard to whatever mood I am in. My favourite anime soundtracks surprisingly do remain to be the Cyberia mix of the Lain OST and Requiem from the Darkness one featuring the songs by Keiko Lee. I’d be flattered to be featured on Lain or Requiem above all. Can’t speak for modern anime programmes or films? 

Do you have a process for writing music? Do you wait for inspiration before starting or just sit and play until you find something that moves you?

1) Create a beat via keyboard or emulate a melody via MIDI synth or soundscape

2) Loop it, configure it with various sound FX, change the octaves and transposition in the middle, pitch and modulation, and the end with it with brief reprises or everything collapsing at the end

3) Not so much rules to follow, like two or three choruses and two verses but more like…add a bunch of stuff and see if it sticks and manipulate the madness in the middle

 Can’t read music notation but can follow a melody in my head. One song I done entirely freeform involving me ‘beatboxing’ (hence the title “Beatbox’d”) and humming melodies all altered and FX’d to make it sound entirely psychedelic or like a robot with my voice (“Funky Junkie” in one or two bits). 

Are there any Japanese musical talents you look to for inspiration? There are elements of Susumu Hirasawa's experimental style for example. 

Most of my favourite anime OSTs and theme songs are either instrumental or in English. I find J-pop can be a tad grating to my ears, no offence? The soundtrack music largely from Keishi Urata of Texhnolyze, Chikada Wasei and Takemoto Akira (involved with the Lain “Cyberia" remix album), and even non-anime composer Susumu Yokota inspired me and a bit of the Diligent Circle of Ekoda (Najica Blitz Tactics). A few songs off of Excel Saga, Speed Grapher, and Elfen Lied, my two all-time favourites, as well as Madlax had some surprises there but I can’t tell you the titles exactly well. I also really like the theme song from the 2004 Gantz series, kick-ass!

I was influenced by DJ Krush too. “Ki-Oku” is a phenomenal Japanese record, blending jazz and hip-hop. Like a Japanese DJ Shadow or Massive Attack at their best!

How do you come up with the names for your tracks?

Part of it because it sounds cool (“Flying On Virgin” because Richard Branson is my favourite billionaire and because aeroplane music is tranquil, used it on my short film Unofficial Tourism Ad for London which I played at a film festival lately)

Part of it is just self-indulgent nonsense (“Descent Into Madness”, me trying to do a Beatles’ “Revolution 9”-style sound collage of angst, environmentalist paranoia, and hell, “Liquid Disturbance” is a remix of an early MXQ song I did for my album “Chaos”)

Most of it are homages (“Happiness…” is a riff on a famous 'Hamlet, the mild cigar' ad campaign, “Dream Pop’d” is a loving tribute to My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, “Alien from the Darkness” was intended to be a reference to one of the few legal hentai to own in the UK despite cuts but it came across as a sexy and disturbing song for those curious, “Moody Lucy” is obviously Elfen Lied).

There's definitely a darker edge to the album overall, it feels quite dystopian and oppressive at times, was this reflective of your creative mood when you were working on the album or just the nature of what was influencing you at the time?

Funny enough you asked, dystopian and oppressive I emulated on previous albums before (“Chaos”, “Catastrophe”) because I wanted to shock the audience into a politically charged album first and then misery porn à la Boards of Canada “Geogaddi”-era in the work. It’s what I know best. FSOL did this with “Dead Cities” and rocked me like a hurricane. This time, I went with sexy and disturbing because I wanted to try something new also from the last work “Fear of a French Planet" which was an excuse to emulate Weather Report and Miles Davis minus the trumpet and embrace Public Enemy-style angst. I was also unemployed and broke (and still am), and am full of self-hatred and repressed frustrations so better to make music out of it than being unfulfilled getting a helium tank to inhale or a noose to find peace in life by a momentary emotional spur. The upcoming EP “Divorce from Reality” will be a return to form albeit without many pounding beats, playing almost like Deep Forest meets Brian Eno.

The alternative cover featuring "Sophie"

The album features some fetching artwork of a character named Sophie - why was she your cover girl?

Album covers involving the Grenfell tower fire (“Chaos”), strange French locales even if it involves non-hentai octopus tentacles for sale, horse meat storefronts, and licensed firearms (“Fear of a French Planet”), or nuclear attacks like this was 1982 (“Catastrophe”) don’t sell so I used Pygmalion-esque AI technology (sorry, artists) to create a woman I’d likely fall in love with but never marry or have children (I refuse to populate the planet or end up divorced, sorry) to create Sophie who was more or less not only a riff on Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction or Shimei Ryomou from Ikki Tousen but a nod to my former girlfriends I had back in the 1990s and 2000s. One of them weirdly enough was named Sophie, dark-haired, doe-eyed. Perfect name for a tomboyish brunette who likes animation, electronic music, politics, and visits Soho, London and Caerdydd for holiday. #PraiseWaifu. Waifus will end the Andrew Tate misogynistic, incel crises or exploitative revenge porn crises, I hope! Thought about it but couldn’t call her or make a fake Lucy the Diclonius and put pink hair and devilish horns for I would’ve faced a copyright infringement lawsuit against me?

Everyone takes something different away from the arts, which is part of what makes it so interesting to take part in - what do you hope people will take from your work on this album?

1) Pornography may seem like fun but it’ll rot your brain. Nothing left to the imagination. By tapping into people’s erotic psyches and flipping it on its head like I did here with the album cover’s sexy satire and choice song titles, wanted to give them something they think they’d get but didn’t expect would be sexier since it doesn’t involve samples of people orgasming

2) Anime for me isn’t always about following what’s trendy, it’s just following what makes you happy. I got into anime initially based on Daft Punk and Ghibli and then sexual ecchi stuff but now get back into it for the sake of nostalgia, missing out on things I didn’t have the chance let alone could afford back when I was a teen seeing all this Elfen, Excel, Najica, Mezzo, Afro, Lain, Ghost in some shells.

3) Hope you like the album. It’s not for everyone but if you like the sort of bizarre, disturbing, and at times kind of erotic sounds found in the more outré, non-Dragon Ball, non-Demon Slayer, non-Naruto titles and think Daft Punk’s “Discovery” wasn’t enough, take a listen to “Sex Sells?”, the second best anime-inspired album ever made! 

Our thanks to Raymond M for chatting with us.