The Columbia Studio Orchestra -- Twilight Memory

 

"The phone rang.

It was a thing that had been sitting here, black and quiet like a holstered gun, unlisted, unknown to anybody, used only for local outgoing calls, and when it was triggered it had the soft, muted sound of a silenced automatic. The first ring was a warning sound. The second time would be death calling."

Mickey Spillane

Look...I had wanted to come up with my own Spillane-esque quote to introduce this song but after wracking my brains for a few minutes, I figured that only the master of crime novels was the right person to provide this. Incidentally, this is a quote that I found from his section of "Libquotes" and the original source is his 1996 novel "Black Alley".

The reason for me going all insane for Spillane is that this song, "Twilight Memory", from the "Space Cobra"（スペースコブラ）anime soundtrack simply sounds perfect for the quintessential noir. I did read some of the original manga but never got to see the 1982 anime. However, I could imagine from my memories that "Space Cobra" may have gotten some inspiration from Mickey Spillane, and thereby the anime begat this wonderfully warm and cool and romantic "Twilight Memory".

All kudos to the composer Kentaro Haneda（羽田健太郎）for this track performed by The Columbia Studio Orchestra which could adorn any actor voiceover of a hard-boiled Spillane description. That lone and lonely trumpet with the strings and then the guitar could be the musical accompaniment for Mike Hammer hitting that all-night diner from Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" painting, where he grimaces over his bowl of searing, stomach-ripping chili as he tries to unravel another hard-as-granite case.

Yet, despite all that old-time night jazz, somewhere in the middle, "Twilight Memory" takes on a more Japanese 80s urban contemporary beat for a brief stint before the trumpet comes back to give its final opinion on life. Moreover, the whole song seems to be a hybrid of Spillane-friendly film noir jazz and those 80s orchestrations of some of the epic film anime that I used to know.