Kajiura composed the music for Erased, a thriller about a man returned to his own childhood. Her score works through restraint, using piano and sparse strings for the winter sequences and reserving her characteristic choral writing for the moments where the plot's weight becomes unbearable.
She is a Japanese composer who began in a group before scoring, and she has since built a body of work across animation, film and games. She writes vocal parts in a constructed language of her own, allowing her to use the voice as pure texture without the distraction of meaning, and she leads performing projects that tour her material internationally.
Recurring subjects: fate, tension built through layered ostinato, and beauty deployed at moments of loss. She combines classical string writing with programmed rhythm and multitracked voice, and her scores are immediately identifiable within a few bars, which is rare in a medium where composers are usually invisible.
Her scores for magical girl and fantasy series are among the most recognised in animation, and her live projects have toured internationally. Her vocal technique has been widely imitated, and she is a standard reference for composers working in the medium's emotional registers.
For listeners who want animation scoring with a signature sound. Suited to anyone who watched the time loop thriller, and to those who should follow it with her fantasy series work.
