Sunday 14th June
Matinee party: 2pm - 4.05pm BST
Evening party: 6pm - 8.05pm BST
The film: https://www.netflix.com/title/60023642
The music: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1C2JCFGEJ5yQIG9UTXyR2m?si=isev4osDQ7y_qyLlUE_yCw

Hello everybody,

Sophie here. On Sunday June 14th we are hosting an online watch party of Studio Ghibli’s masterpiece “Spirited Away” with a Haiku soundtrack.

The seeds of this idea was gifted to us in a tweet sent five years ago by our friend Steven Battelle.

We’re all big fans of Studio Ghibli. I can’t put into words how these films make me feel exactly… a mixture of the magical quietness, the subtlety of the dialogue, the weirdness, yet mainly just the simple beauty of it all leaves me with a feeling I can’t quite pinpoint.

With no inroad or way of exploring the possibilities of our music and a Ghibli film at the time the idea was put away, hiding from view for a while. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, with the time that lockdown has given us, that we realised that we might be able to try to intertwine the two in some way.

Last month we hosted a watch party of Buster Keaton’s ‘The General’ with our contemporary soundtrack, the film was streaming on BFI player, and the music streaming elsewhere. It went OK, and we realised that with the Ghibli collection on Netflix at the moment we may be able to re-score a film with our music. There wasn’t any discussion about which film we would pick. Spirited Away has long since been a favourite, so spooky and other-worldly.  

Initially there were ideas to do a new score entirely. We started to sequence our back catalogue to the film to see how this might work. Then small coincidences started appearing. Tiny synchronicities. When we began the film and our music were entirely separate entities but as we pieced more and more of it together they somehow came to be meaningfully related. It felt strange and exciting. We hope you feel the same way.

It feels brave to present our music as a pairing to something as untouchable as Ghibli and Spirited Away. But these are weird times, and if you can’t do weird things in weird times when can you do them?

The watch parties are free to all but if you would like to make a donation 50% of all donations on 14th June will go to Black Lives Matter UK, and 50% will go to Music Venue Trust.


Instructions!

1. If you are not already registered with Netflix do so here: https://www.netflix.com/

2.If you wish to watch along with a DVD or Blu-ray please be aware there are two slightly different edits of the film. The one you need is the 125 minute cut (not the 120 minute one). The credits at the beginning may also be slightly different so for best results use Netflix.

3. You will need two devices.

4. One device to play the film from, make sure this is muted, and you have subtitles on. You also need to make sure the film is paused at 0:00 (very important, otherwise there might a lag) . If your system is prone to buffering, test it out before hand. https://www.netflix.com/title/60023642

5. The other device will play the soundtrack on Spotify. Here.
or:
Tidal - https://tidal.com/browse/album/143284365
Deezer - https://www.deezer.com/us/album/151450152
Apple - https://music.apple.com/gb/album/songs-for-chihiro/1516022324

6. Make sure your settings on Spotify are: gapless playback ON, automix OFF. These are the default settings on Spotify but double check anyway.

7. You can do this when you like! If you would like to join in the watch parties, press play at exactly the same time on both devices at the viewing of your choice, 2pm or 6pm. Use hashtag #songsforchihiro

8. There will be a few seconds silence before the first track starts. Don’t panic. It’s fine.

9. For the 2pm viewing we’ll introduce the tracks on twitter, and chat a bit about the process.

10. Have a wonderful time!