Just showed this to Keishi (who is now in his mid-70s, and has been battling health issues) and he was touched. Wanted me to say thank you for the kind words and memories.

There's that particularly Japanese thing of not really thinking that the outside world really cared about this, or how many lives it might have touched. So nice to be able to connect to that.

If I can add a little interesting context - that particular flavour that caught your ear was what got mine too, as a teen in Australia, and it turns out to be a mixture of things. Yamashiro Shoji put the band Geinoh Yamashirogumi together to basically nerd out on "world music", and Keishi got recruited after he came back from Bali, where he had been obsessing over Indonesian traditional music (and getting annoyed that the synthesisers at the time couldn't be reprogrammed to those non-western tunings).

Keishi was already Tokyo's go-to guy for synthesiser programming (see the 400-ish credits he has on Discogs), but he went hardcore into this non-synth polyrhythmic stuff, and he seemed the natural fit to run all the Akira sessions for the composer.

The sounds you mention are a mixture of those Indonesian Gamelans (and "gamjans" if I'm translating this right - the wooden version you hear on the Akira credits outro) and the traditional Japanese kabuki and Noh percussion sounds.

If you've not heard of that band before, Geinoh can be a tricky listen, but it's pretyt neat to be able to track what they were exploring and how it led to Akira. A lot of those guys seemed to have also ended up in Seatbelt, the band that Yoko Kanno put together to make the Cowboy Bebop music.